How do you grow orchids well? The key lies in choosing the potting medium this way

The first step in growing orchids is, of course, the potting medium. If the medium is wrong, the orchids you grow will either have root rot or become stunted. Hao She Farmer has always liked using pine bark, simply because I have seen wild orchids in the mountains growing together with pine trees.

Some netizens say: pine bark is easy to find, there are plenty of wood processing plants. But is this kind suitable for growing orchids? Most of the pine bark from wood processing plants is fresh; the time from felling the tree to processing is no more than half a year, because if too much time passes, the pine wood will be attacked by borers. If this kind of pine bark is used to grow orchids, it must go through a long period of artificial composting, and even then the results are not very good.

The pine bark Hao She Farmer looks for comes from pine stumps that were felled more than 5 years ago. After 5 winters and 5 plum rains of natural decay, the heartwood of the stumps has already rotted into mud. In fact, this stump mud is also a good potting medium for orchids; it could be said to be more reliable than most orchid potting media sold on the market.

After natural composting, the turpentine in the pine bark has also decomposed and volatilized, so this kind of pine bark smells only faintly of pine resin and feels very loose and crisp. After taking it home, sun-dry it to sterilize and kill insects, then chop it up and it can be used to mix potting medium. There is no need to worry that it will ferment a second time and damage the roots; its chemical properties are already stable.

Hao She Farmer once used this kind of pine bark mixed with the rotten heartwood of stumps to plant several pots of Cymbidium faberi, and they were not inferior to those grown in other media. On the contrary, the orchid roots grew better, possibly because rotten stumps are relatively soft and loose. But because rotten stumps are hard to collect in quantity, this can only be a small-scale trial planting.