Masdevallias, YES!


Freshly mounted Masdevallia orchid, June 2008

Masdevallias, YES. By Valerie Allgrove June 2008

Yes, I'd like to be able to grow Masdevallia Orchids. In my Connecticut River Valley home. Where it is far too hot for these cool-growing cloud forest plants.

Kim Metzler of Kinderwassa Acres Orchids and Tropical Plants had a number of suggestions for success. Which I promptly took home and took to heart.

Here is a synopsis of Kim Metzler's suggestions for how you can grow Masdevallias. And Draculas, too.

Kim doesn't want to sell us anything we will immediately kill. He started out by reminding us that for these orchids, the moisture comes from the mist that is in the air, not down pouring rain. Cloud forest means cloud. In the fog all day, bright but indirect light. Both humidity and air movement are necessary ingredients. These plants grow on rocks where there is a lot of moisture.

The first change was to use live moss. Not sphagnum moss, but sheet moss, the kind of live green moss that can be found in the woods. It is important that the moss be alive, for this helps it to be damp and to give the Masdevallias what they need for moisture.

Experimenting with pots, Kim found that terra cotta pots worked best as they absorb water and breathe. Shorter pots didn't work. The best strategy is to use a rose pot. A rose pot is higher than it is wide by 1 times. Azalea pot is wider that it is tall by a ratio of . He wraps live sheet moss around the roots of the plant and puts garbage (meaning rocks, broken pots, plastic peanuts, etc) in the bottom of the pot for drainage. The pots sit in about 1 inch of water. This provides the humidity with the wicking action of the terra cotta pots. The roots stay about the garbage and the whole plant stays damp without being submerged.

A non-potting way to grow Masdevallias is to mount the plants on rocks with live moss from outside, tied on with fish line. In about 4-6 months the plants start to connect to the rock with roots. Kim did this starting with sick plants and they all started to thrive.

Draculas are cool growing and more sensitive than Masdevallias. Kim experimented with potting them, using the live moss in a basket pot. Flowers of the Draculas come out through the basket.

He rarely fertilizes, stating that in nature plants get little fertilizer except occasional bird poo, leaves, or bugs. Where the plants are growing on live moss they get a little extra from the moss. If he does fertilize, he gets the cheapest 10-10-10 at Wal-Mart. He has used dehydrated cow manure, making a "tea" from it for both a fertilizer and a fungicide. Kim stays away from greenhouse chemicals and the worries over health problems caused by exposure to them.

Kim tries to focus on growing for new people. He says put the Masdevallias in a pot this way in your living room and it will grow. It's a different way of doing it. Always in a tray of water. The rocks or the clay pots will cool the plants down. With a fan maintaining air movement, the plants should thrive. Air movement saves your plants because it prevents dead pockets of air that are extremely cold or hot. More humidity and more air movement is better for your plants and for you.

Medically, if you keep your house at 50% humidity you will have almost no colds or other influenza. Kim is a registered nurse and said that we get sick because our mucus membranes dry out. His greenhouse is usually at 75%, tries to keep it towards 90% with constant precipitation. His biggest problem is slugs and snails. In winter his greenhouse goes as low as 45F no problems with any orchids, despite the temperatures, because he has good air movement. There are 7 big fans in his greenhouse, going 24 hours a day.

Thursday I gathered moss in the woods. I selected some interesting rocks, pieces of pegmatite with mica, quartz, and above all, hollows for the orchids to consider putting their roots onto. I took a couple of flat ceramic baking pans (plain white ceramic, easily affordable from the Ocean State Job Lot) and I'm experimenting with what he shared.