Coelogyne mooreana

Greetings Christine,

My apology for not replying to your question before this, but I did not see it before.

C mooreana flower from the centre of the new growths, so all I do is encourage new growth to initiate by quite heavey feeding (full strenght fertiliser 2 to 3 times in the warm part of the year) and growing in high mosture retentive neutral mix.

They grow very well in sphagnum for up to one year for me, but then tend to go backwards as the sphagnum goes off and breaks down.

I've grown it in composted pine bark and that was OK but only for a few months! I found out that after a few months the plant had lost all roots and was proceeding to shed leaves.

I've grown it most successvuly for several years now in staight "medium" grade perlite, which is quite fine in fact.

Recently I'm trying a mix of coconut chips and Perlit, this looks promissing, but I should not talk about it too soon.

I grow several under 50% shade cloth on the west side of the house in Melbourne, but I also have some just hanging in my apricot tree where they get full sun during the morning and some shading from the tree in the summer afternoons. In winter they get no shade.

As for watering, I only ever water all my orchids once a week in summer and less in cooler times.

I feed all my orchid 2 or 3 times a year by using a siphon mixer and hose the fertiliser (Thrive or Aquasol) solution on to all my orchids quite indiscriminantly. I have a 10:1 siphon mixer, it takes up one part of high strength fertiliser to 10 part of tap water. So I mix up a high strength fertilised solution of 10 times the recommended strenghth in a rubish bin and use the siphon mixer to dispense it.

Before I had so many orchids I used to hand feed my orchids by dunking each one in a standard strength fertiliser solution.

I find that C. mooreana, as in deed most orchid, do better if they are occasionally divided and potted into fresh medium. I particularly found that when repotting from a bark mix it is essential to remove all particles of bark as even a few bark particles in a sphagnum or Perlte mix can soure up the whole pot and result in dead roots.

Good luck with your C. mooreana. When it flowers put a photo up for all to see here.