How to Choose Orchid Pots? A Guide to Selecting the Ideal Orchid Pot

(1) The orchid room is the macro environment, the pot is the micro environment

In growing orchids, one should make the orchid room or orchid bench into an environment where orchids live comfortably. This is something the author has always emphasized and repeatedly advocated.

If the surroundings of a human dwelling can be called the macro living environment, then the house where one lives and rests can be called the micro living environment. When a person encounters uncomfortable living conditions in a house, they can immediately leave, temporarily or permanently.

Once an orchid is planted in its pot, when it encounters adversity severe enough to endanger its life, it remains confined within that pot, having to endure six months or a year, until the next repotting and division, before it can leave this hostile pot environment. Therefore, whether the pot we choose is appropriate is especially closely related to how well the planted orchid grows and propagates.

In a well-conditioned orchid room, if the pots chosen are inappropriate, one still cannot maintain the orchid's health, cannot extend its proper lifespan, let alone achieve normal propagation. If we take great pains to create a perfect orchid room but choose inappropriate pots, it truly makes one lament a task nine ren high falling short by one basketful!

(2) Choose pots with the same drainage speed

The size of the orchid pot's structure, the thickness of the pot walls, the coarseness of the entire pot material, the size of the drainage holes at the bottom, and whether the pot bottom is made flat or slanted. These various details differ greatly in how they affect drainage and ventilation in the pot.

In order to harmonize many orchid pots in the orchid room so that drainage speed can be uniform and consistent, one must use pots that are similar in size, thickness, coarseness, and shape, so that many orchid pots in the same room, watered at the same time, after the same interval, will all be in the same dry state, or at least not differ too greatly.

Because if the various orchid pots in the orchid room differ too greatly in drainage speed, and the same amount of water is poured every day, over time, without our realizing it, the slow-draining ones will constantly have waterlogged, rotten roots, while the fast-draining ones are often too dry, leading to poor development. Waterlogged rotten roots and dry stunted growth are both major taboos in cultivation!