The practice of exchanging orchids babies is very common among orchid lovers. Many owners of large collections of abundantly aborted orchids often donate unrooted layering to everyone. Having received such a plant as a gift or independently separating the offspring from your own parent specimen, you need to know what to do next with it. The proposed article will tell you about How To Transplant An Orchid Baby and take care of it.
How To Transplant An Orchid Baby?
The procedure for transplanting a baby itself is very simple, but it has an important nuance. At first, the root collar should not come into contact with the surface of the substrate. Therefore, the landing is made high:
- the baby is placed in an empty glass;
- a moist substrate is gradually poured into the glass so that the root collar remains “in a suspended state”, 0.5 cm above the surface.
Such a landing will not allow the neck to rot, but the young roots will actively peck and grow.
There is one problem with the landing. Often the roots of the offspring do not grow down but to the sides. In such a situation, planting the baby so that the root collar is raised is quite difficult. Therefore, you have to be very careful, trying not to break off, bend the roots down. Recommended for you Caring For Cattleya Orchids.
If, in addition to horizontal roots, the baby has roots growing downward, then the horizontal ones can be left outside as air.
When To Remove Baby Orchid For Translplant?
First of all, you need to determine how ready the baby is for independent life without feeding from the mother plant. The following parameters are indicative of such readiness:
- the presence of 2-3 leaves;
- the presence of their roots.
Best of all, offspring rooted and grow, which have 2 or 3 own roots up to 3-5 cm long.
When the separation of the baby from the “mother” is delayed, and the offspring has time to grow longer roots, their neat placement in the pot can be problematic. Sometimes it happens the other way around: the florist gets too young a baby, with only outlined roots or without them at all. In both cases, an individual approach to the young plant will be required.
Important! There is a positive practice of dropping children with only one spine. But you need to be extremely careful with such an offspring. If the root breaks, there is nothing to replace it with.
It is desirable that the roots of the children be “racked” that is, actively growing, with a green tip. If the roots are tightly nodded, and at the end, there is not even a green dot indicating the readiness to start growing, the rooting of such offspring can be problematic.
Preparing Pot for transplanting Orchid babies
The next stage is the preparation of containers for planting children. At home, transparent plastic cups are most often used. They can be prepared in two ways:
- Make 1-2 holes at the bottom of the glass to drain excess water.
- Make a double cup. In one, make many holes along the walls and at the bottom. In the second, whole, pour expanded clay on a quarter of the volume and insert a glass with holes into it.
The advantages of the first method are ease of preparation and long retention of moisture in the substrate. On the one hand, this is good, because the soil dries out too quickly in small containers. On the other hand, the aeration of the roots deteriorates significantly, and the root system of the offspring suffers, which is accustomed to the air environment while the baby was sitting on the mother plant.
The second method eliminates the shortcomings of the first. Air passes through the holes in the cup, and the roots of the baby do not suffocate. And so that the substrate does not dry too quickly, the expanded clay layer in the second glass is constantly moistened.
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Preparing soil for transplanting orchid baby
There are many soil recipes for planting orchid babies. Florists experiment with different materials, mixing them in different proportions. And yet, most orchid lovers prefer the classics – pine bark and sphagnum moss.
The combination of bark and moss gives the substrate the properties necessary for the rooting of children. The bark makes it loose and leaves many cavities for air. Moss is used for moisture retention and does not allow the soil to quickly turn into a “cracker”. The main thing is to choose the right proportions of these components. This is done based on where the baby was cut from:
| Place of formation of the baby | The percentage of pine bark in the substrate | The percentage of moss in the substrate |
| Peduncle | 70% | 30% |
| Stem | 50% | 50% |
| Pseudobulb | 50% | 50% |
This approach takes into account how the roots of the children are accustomed to the air and how much the offspring has learned to “feed” on its own.
It is better to buy bark in the store, and not bring it from the forest. Different manufacturers of orchid substrates offer pine bark of a more or less coarse fraction. For kids, you need a small one.
The components of the substrate are poured in the required quantities into a large bowl, filled with clean water without chlorine and discarded in a colander. If desired, add 2 drops of Radix per liter to the water.
Tip # 1. Instead of the classic recipe from bark and moss for planting children, you can take the innovative material “ZeoFlora for Orchids”. It represents small stones of natural yellowish zeolite. Its advantage is that it absorbs water and keeps it for a long time, giving the orchid “in portions”. The looseness and air permeability of the substrate does not suffer.
The substrate is moistened just before planting. It is not recommended to plant children in dry soil.
Orchid Baby without roots: ways to build up the root system
Ideally, babies do not separate from the mother plant until they have roots. If for some reason, it happened otherwise, it is impossible to plant the offspring in the ground. First, you have to help him give roots.
There are various tricks to help achieve root growth in an orchid baby. The most effective are the following:
| Way | Description |
| Greenhouse room | take a large plastic glass; fill it with expanded clay by 1 cm; pour water on expanded clay so that it is covered with water, but does not float; lay moistened sphagnum on top of expanded clay in half the volume of the glass; make a ring with fasteners out of wire and place it on a glass; place the baby with the base in the ring so that the base is 0.5 cm above the surface of the moss; cover the glass on top with a cut bottle or bag; ventilate the greenhouse every day and, as necessary, spray moss and add water to expanded clay. |
| Foam rafts | in a flat square piece of foam about 3 cm thick, make a round through-hole with a diameter of 3 cm in the center; place the base of the baby in the hole; put the foam in a bowl of water; check that the baby does not touch the surface of the water with the base. |
The greenhouse method is used in practice much more often. At the same time, the methods of attaching a baby or filling a glass can be different:
“I just hang the kids over a glass of water on bamboo skewers placed on a grate. I put a pebble in the bottom of the glass for balance, and I don’t add any moss there. I cover it with a cut-off five-liter bottle. Roots appear very quickly ”(Zhanna, Kislovodsk).
When the baby grows roots, it is planted in the substrate in the usual way.
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In order for the child to grow roots faster, the greenhouse must be very well lit. To put it in the sun, in this case, in no case – so the offspring “cooked”. Lighting should be produced by special phytolamps.
Caring for transplanted orchid babies
Cups with planted children are immediately placed under the phytolamp. The better and more correct the light, the faster young orchids take root and begin to grow. Good lighting cannot be replaced by any fertilizers and growth stimulants.
In addition, plants need to be provided with a moderately warm and humid microclimate. The air temperature should be kept within + 22-250С. Spraying with warm water or a solution of the drug “Epin-Extra” is useful, which helps children to adapt to new conditions as soon as possible.
Watering is not needed in the first 10 days after planting. Subsequently, irrigation of orchids planted in simple cups is carried out as the moss dries in the substrate by immersion in water. Children planted in double cups can simply be watered from a watering can so that the flowing water covers the expanded clay layer.
The first transplant of grown children: timing and methods
Orchid children will spend in the cups as much time as they need in order for the roots to fully master the volume of the substrate. By this time, they are already well adapted to an autonomous existence and can be transplanted in one of the following ways:
- Into a transparent plastic pot with holes. If the condition of the roots of a young orchid is good, such a transplant can be done by transshipment. If there are any doubts, it is better to free the roots from the old substrate and disinfect before planting in clean soil. The standard soil composition for potting is 70% bark and 30% moss, or clean bark.
- In a hanging basket. You can buy it at a flower shop or make it yourself. Orchids are planted in baskets in the same way as in pots, and as the root system continues to grow, the roots go out into the cracks and hang freely down.
- On the block. A young orchid is removed from the cup, freed from the substrate and fixed on a piece of wood with bark with the help of a soft elastic twine. At the same time, the roots are covered with sphagnum, which must be kept in a moderately moist state.
The choice of a method for further growing grown orchids depends on the taste preferences of the grower. However, it is believed that placement in baskets and blocks is most comfortable for the orchids themselves.
Some orchid lovers immediately place separated babies on blocks, without first growing them in cups. This can be done if the offspring was separated from the mother plant late and the roots are inconvenient to place in the pot.
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Expert advice on choosing a pot for transplanting grown orchid babies
For transplanting children with a well-grown root system, you can use not only standard plastic pots or baskets.
“Now on sale, you can find so-called“ crowns ”for orchids, reminiscent of around fence. In terms of decorativeness, they are better than ordinary perforated pots, and the aeration of the roots when planting in the crown remains at a high level. But I do not recommend using various colored pots made of thick transparent colored plastic. They look beautiful, but the orchids in them easily suffocate and suffocate.”
Questions about planting or translplanting orchid babies
How to properly prepare “ZeoFlora” for planting orchid babies?
The required amount of material is poured into a bowl and fill with water. In this case, there will be a hiss and active emission of carbon dioxide. Pebbles need to be kept in water for about an hour. After that, the water is drained, the soil is washed and used for planting orchids.
Can a baby be dropped off in a closed system?
Yes, there is a practice of planting children in closed systems. To do this, take a tall glass or vase. A layer of expanded clay 3 cm thick is poured onto the bottom and filled with water. A small layer of moss is laid on top. Then a baby is placed in a glass and covered with a moist substrate from the bark. Practice shows that plants planted according to this method grow roots very quickly and give new leaves. They will need a transplant much later than children growing in cups. The only disadvantage of this method is the high risk of overflow and root rot. Therefore, the irrigation regime must be selected very carefully and do not forget about good lighting.
