The ongoing saga of adapting a purchased Wardian case as an intermediate temperature orchid growing case, my orchidarium.
The configuration in the picture is temporary, with plants more or less hanging from the roof or sitting on the bottom in places that will help me gauge light preferences. The large piece of grapewood to the left is in its final position and has one plant (Specklinia grobyi) permanently placed.
The lighting is now solved, after some fits and starts. A combination of 40 watt and 90 watt LED lamps gave too MUCH light, so I have scaled back to 2 of the 40 watt lamps (Kessil Tuna Sun A160WE), both shining through a glass plate in the roof so that waste heat stays outside the case. Happily, the structural parts of the orchidarium are now complete - vent fan, internal fans for air flow, and lighting. I do all the watering by hand with a pump-up spray bottle; the case is small and this only takes about one minute. I do the main watering in the morning and a quick misting at night when the lights go out. Almost all of the plants are now thriving.
I have several large pieces of rot-resistant grapewood burl (bloomsandbranches.com) that are beautifully natural and have a nice texture for orchid roots. The source says that they are sandblasted but otherwise untreated. You can see some of them in the picture above. I played around with various methods of situating them in the case. I tried bolting them together and sitting them on the bottom, but that isn't easy because the wood is so irregular and is filled with unexpected pockets and layers so screws don't hold well. I did get some of the core parts bolted together to make a base. I tried just leaning them up against the glass, but that is not very stable and limits the way they can be arranged. Finally, I stumbled on using the fact that the roof of my case is steel and that very strong neodymium magnets are inexpensive: I am hanging the grapewood from magnet hooks attached to the inside of the roof. My mounting wood is itself epiphytic! I drill small holes near the top of the wood and thread wires through them and the hooks. Black nylon-coated fishing leader wire is perfect - strong and nearly invisible. This method is simple, easy, and very flexible because I can move the magnets around and change the lengths of the suspension wires easily. If you have a case that does not have a ferromagnetic roof, you could achieve something close by drilling holes and inserting hook bolts or stringing guy wires that you can hang things from. Grapewood burl is fairly light but a piece can weigh up to a few pounds, and then there are the plants and water weight, so you would need a roof with considerable strength. Fortunately mine came with that.
Mounting orchids directly to the grapewood is finicky work though fairly easy. It is awkward threading monofilament line around the pieces of wood when in place, and tying knots in that stuff seems to require three or more hands, making me wish once again that we were bipeds evolved from hexapods. An alternative is to use Super Glue, but that makes white deposits that are glaring and very hard to get rid of or camouflage. The monofilament is hard to see and when the plant is established it can be removed. Partly because I am not very patient with finicky work, but also because the final mounted position of the plant ideally is gotten right the first time, I am doing this part very gradually. Okay okay, I have mounted ONE plant directly to the grapewood so far. But it is lovely!
The light intensity across the cabinet is extremely wide ranging, which is good for plant diversity but challenging for placing individual plants. What seems to be working fine, but is very slow, is hanging or sitting a plant on the original mount or pot in some location that I think will work, and then waiting a month or two to see if it thrives. I have found that most of the cloud forest orchids I have in the case get a purple flush or spots on their leaves well before getting dead sunburn patches as I am used to for windowsill plants. One plant (Lepanthes gargoyla) went from being dark green to bright purple in about a month. Often the purpling starts within a day or two. When that happens, I back off a bit until I get a spot where the leaf color looks correct for the species; some are supposed to be purple, but not many. I have tried to use a cell phone light meter but damned if I can get the readings to match what the plants are telling me. I have spots where the light meter says 200 footcandles and a plant that is said to like 500-1,000 footcandles turns purple within days. I don't think my light spectrum is weird - these lamps are designed for plants and the orchids once situated well are clearly happy. I think the cell phone light meters are inaccurate at low light levels. So I use the plants as my guide.
For orchid growers used to things like Cattleya or Phalaenopsis (each new leaf is cause for celebration), many of the plants you can grow in an orchidarium are fast fast fast! Sometimes, when I get a plant such as a small Masdevallia or Pleurothallis in just the right spot in the case, the plant will start firing out new leaves and flower spikes like mad. Well, the orchid version of "like mad", which is not quite tomato plant mad. For example, I have a Masdevallia sernae plant (reputed to be easy to grow) with about 10 leaves that sat like a lump for 6 months, and within a month of getting the right conditions (mostly lighting), shot out many new roots and at least 10 new leaves. This is a bit extreme, but something of the sort is common. Some of the plants flower and grow nearly continuously, with sequentially flowering spikes that pump out flower after flower for a year or flushes of single-flowered spikes coming in every month or two. True, everything is on a small scale, but for sheer cultural abundance and gem like beauty they are incomparable. I particularly like my two Scaphosepalum plants (S. breve and S. aff. swertifolium, which means it is swertifolium or something very similar) - both are sequential bloomers and as one flower passes the next one is already forming, with elaborate curls and protrusions swelling and morphing gradually into the final flower form. The flower buds are just as fun to look at as the open flowers, and the final flower is a three-dimensional fantasy landscape, nearly impossible to photograph.
