Water Quality

It seems that my water quality got really bad in the last year. I think the drought has something to do with the increase in dissolved solids, which is over 400 ppm the last time I tested my water.

Besides having to deal with the cold winter weather, I have had problems with water quality. I know that I have lost several orchids due to salt build up in the potting medium. I have been using coconut husk chips as potting medium, which was working really well. Then when the water quality got bad, many of my orchids started to lose their roots. I didn't know what was going on for a long time, but I finally concluded that with the combination of the cold winter and bad water quality, the potting medium was retaining too much salt.

I don't think I have recovered fully yet from this situation. I need to repot so many of the plants at this point. I'm considering going back to NZ moss, but who knows what I'll do. Since it's already heading into late summer, I don't think I will do any re-potting until next spring. In the mean time, what I'm doing to mitigate the situation is to water more often and not fertilize. Not fertilizing sounds terrible, but I haven't lost any more orchids for a while. But i think watering often is what helped the most. The photo from the previous post shows the leaves of one orchid showing signs of salt damage.

Here's a photo of happier times before the cold winter two years ago.