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The changeover being taking my hoyas out of semi-hydroponics and into regular potting mix.
It really amazed me to find how many hoyas I had/have in semi-hydro. I needed to buy new pots and saucers to transplant them all. I'd done about a dozen of them so far, and then ran out of saucers, so I counted how many I had left to do so I know how many more to buy, then kept finding more. Yikes, sure glad I know where to buy it all cheap.
I have to tell you all that the smell coming out of those pellets is just awful. I have changed the water in them every month or so since I started with the semi-hydro and regularly give them a few weeks off of fertilizer. There was algae in only a very few of them, and surprisingly (to me anyway) those didn't stink). So, just in case I have a change of heart sometime in the future, I am boiling all the pellets for about 10-15 minutes to kill anything organic in them that may remain. And then after they dry, I'm pouring them back into the bag from which they came.
I have found in taking them out though, that in most plants the roots stick fast to the hydroton pellets, but in only a very few plant (cummingiana for one) the roots just dropped away from the pellets easily.
So, the great experiment failed to meet expectations from my perspective. What went wrong? In some cases, once the roots grew enough to reach the water reservoir, they got waterlogged. In some cases, the roots barely grew. In some cases, the foliage barely grew. In some cases, the plant took off like the dickens - but those are too few and far between to have made a difference. Perhaps the smell is behind a lot of the failures; its a very acrid smell.
I know we discussed this on another thread but I thought I'd start it fresh from my own perspective that in the end, it didn't impress me enough to continue.
Christine
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