After repotting an orchid and changing the growing medium, never change the soil again within 2 years

Everyone knows that orchids are a type of perennial herbaceous plant, and their growth rate is relatively slow. Like other plants, orchids also need a relatively stable environment to grow, which means the growing medium in the pot and the surrounding environment need to be relatively stable, and frequent repotting and soil changes are not suitable. Under the condition of providing the orchid with a relatively stable environment, orchids can grow very well for many consecutive years, and will get better year after year. I have personally experienced this. Orchid enthusiasts who usually pay attention to observation should also notice that in the first year after repotting, the grass does not grow very well, but starting from the second year the growth is clearly better than before, and the new shoots are also stronger than in the first year. This shows that after a relatively long period of time, the orchid has already begun to adapt to the environment you have provided for it. And when it has just begun to adapt to this environment, you want to change it again. Tossing it back and forth like this will only make your grass weaker and weaker the more you grow it. The purpose of repotting is to divide the seedlings or replace the growing medium so that the orchid grows better, but repotting too frequently does just the opposite. Especially now that most of us use granular growing media, after repotting, the degree of contact between the orchid roots and the growing medium will be greatly reduced, thereby greatly affecting root growth and the absorption of nutrients. Therefore, unless there is something wrong with the orchids I grow in pots, I generally rarely repot and change the soil within 2 years.

As for the growing medium, I think growing orchids is actually also a process of cultivating the growing medium. Orchid enthusiasts who have kept fish all know that to keep fish you first cultivate the water, and the same principle applies here. If the growing medium is well cultivated, the grass will grow better and better. Under proper management, as long as the newly grown seedlings do not show a phenomenon of being clearly weaker than the previous generation, it means that the growing medium is basically viable and can continue to be used. Many orchid enthusiasts, however, will dump out and replace or throw away the growing medium just when a pot of growing medium has not yet been fully cultivated and matured, or has just been cultivated and matured. What a pity. Those who are reluctant to throw away the replaced growing medium will sometimes use the old growing medium to plant some ordinary grass, and you may find that this ordinary grass planted with old growing medium grows far better than what you grow with new growing medium. As long as we ponder it carefully, the reason is not hard to figure out. As for the growing medium, as long as it has not been used to plant diseased grass, I reuse all of it after screening. Especially for mixed granular growing medium, as long as its properties have not changed, there should be no problem reusing it for ten or eight years. The old growing medium that has been replaced, as long as the orchids previously planted in it showed no adverse reactions, should be added to the new growing medium as much as possible to retain the orchid fungus community already formed in the original growing medium. Also do not let the properties and proportions of the new and old growing medium undergo too great a change. Alternatively, through planting you can summarize whether the old growing medium has any shortcomings, and by adding some other growing medium to adjust the ratio, it may be much better than using a completely new growing medium.