Compost for U.quelchii

Gilles LARDY (lardyg7@cti.ecp.fr)
Sat, 20 Jan 1996 17:21:39 +0100 (MET)

Dear Isao, dear Christoph, dear All,

Thank you for you good advice. Now it is my turn. When I bought my plant,
I've had a long discussion whith Jean-Jacques LABAT (Nature et Paysages), so
as to know how to grow it.

He explained me that his plants had half sunlight, and the place where they
were was well aerated and about 75% humidity. But the most interesting is
the soil he uses. In fact he has just changed his way of growing it. Before
he was using a peat/sphagnum mix, but he observed that just as in nature,
the stolons did not want to go deeper than one or two centimeters in the
soil. He also seemed to have the same problem as you, Christoph, because his
soil was always too wet. So he decided to completely change the soil.

Now he fills his pot with crumpled geotextile (I don't know if the name is
the same in english, this is the french name for horticultural tissue used
to separate different layers of soil). On the top of this he deposes an
horizontal layer of geotextile and then 1 or two centimeters of compost made
of peat, sphagnum and vermiculite (anyway a very light compost). This way
the water is absorbed by capillarity by the textile, and the thin layer of
compost, where the plant grows has just as much water as needed, so nomore
rot problems at all...

My plant seems to be healthy, although it keeps on giving small (1 cm long)
green prostrated leaves.

Hope this will help you,

Gilles
*****************************
Gilles LARDY
E_mail : lardyg7@cti.ecp.fr