It's not always peaches and cream

[LJA]

So, I really appreciated all the comments you guys made on my growing in the Milt thread. I'm a professional at this point, and I wouldn't expect anything less of myself than primo plants.

HOWEVER: Providing the kind of environment that allows orchids to do their best also provides the kind of environment that allows their fungal and bacterial enemies to thrive as well. That's the constant battle, and it's one we don't always win.

We all like showing off our accomplishments, but I think it's important to remind people every once in a while that even quality growers get the same issues everyone else does. Here are a couple examples.

This first one is a Zootropheon atropurpurea that needs to be kept sopping, and that's exactly the kind of environment that fungus adores. I have cut, sprayed, cut, sprayed, and cut and sprayed this thing, and it *still* keeps developing fungal lesions that can make an orchid's foliage look like it was attacked by a biblical plague.

The second pic is a Paph. with leaf tip dieback, again fungal. I've cut and cut and sprayed, and it just won't go away. Obviously, these plants can't go out to the public, so it's doubly galling that they're going to have to be grown out fungus-free for several years until they're appropriate for retail consumption again. (By the way, you can differentiate between fungal dieback and salt buildup dieback by how the leaf tips look. Salt toxicity that rushed to the ends of the leaves will create brown leaf tips with a hard edge between the dead brown part and the healthy green part. Fungal dieback will result in brown leaf tips gradually fading through chlorosis to yellow and finally green where the leaf is still healthy, like you see here. There's no hard line between the brown and the green.)

So while everyone who's into these things can (and should, I think) go to whatever effort is necessary to grow as well as they possibly can, sometimes the effort can be in vain, and you have to take the bad with the good.