The big haul

[Phyrex]

Last Thursday I received a call from the flower shop across the street to pick up some "stuff". This stuff turned out to be a bucket of out-of-bloom orchids that I had previously told the owner about with respect to them dehydrating. The bucket contained 6 orchids (2 cattleya, 1 oncidium intergenic, 4 phals) and pretty much took me the majority of last Saturday to clean and pot. Such a nice thing to give them to me to rescue instead of to dump them in the garbage.

While I'm optimistic about the survival of most of them I'm really in doubt about the survival of the cattleya as the rhizome and roots are quite black. Is it some kind of sickness or is it just because the rhizome was previously cut in a manner that has facilitated such blackness? Hope someone can help.