This handsome little guy came as a free bonus from Holm’s orchid shop. I think they’re doing their own hybrids since there’s a bunch of Holm-named hybrids in their web shop.
Hold up - I feel like I always see tillandsia as air plants. It never dawned on me that I could put them on a medium. Does it draw water from the medium or do you still need to spray/soak it??
I feel like my failure with air plants comes from never remembering to soak them/spray them whereas I can generally remember to water my other plants. This opens up whole new worlds for me lol
Yep, you certainly can, though you need to take a little extra care to make sure the medium doesn’t stay soupy for too long. But about once every two weeks I’ll soak the terrarium floor so the water level is just about to reach the surface, but never enough to make any of the bark and stuff float, and this keeps the humidity quite high for a while. I do try and spray once a day, but with this setup they stay pretty happy even if I forget to spray for a few days.
If you’re curious about the medium, it’s nothing special. I just do some handfuls so that i get a mostly equal amount of orchid bark, sphagnum, and whatever those clay/lava ball rocks are. I think as long as there’s not too much of anything that allows fungus or molds or other microbial life to thrive, they do well and start sending out roots and latching on to the stuff.
Thank you, this is super helpful! I have a small terrarium set up and I’d love to add some of these beauties to it.
No prob. Ive been doing it this way for a few years, and ive been through the full lifecycle of several species. Since im in a temperate climate i do move them outside for late spring through early autumn since there’s so much rain and humidity. But the really tiny species spend their whole life in the terrarium.
Pretyy!
That’s an orchid? It’s amazing.
Not an orchid, it’s a bromeliad, tillandsia, specifically. Orchid suppliers very often offer bromeliads as well since many species are epiphytes, and they generally thrive under the same kind of care.
