A Long Overdue Keiki Grow Experiment Update

As one of my readers pointed out a little while ago, it’s high time I updated you all on my Keiki Grow Paste experiment. When I last blogged about it at the end of May (yikes…um…it’s now Sepember), there was some really weird stuff going on with the keikis. But now, I’m happy to report that I do have some bona fide keikis growing, roots and all. Let me show you:

This is the Phal that had the Kermit balls growth

So, the Phal in the above photo actually has a whole mess of keikis growing, but only one or two of the ones at the top are actually putting out roots. It’s hard to tell, but I think there are two keikis each with one root as opposed to one keiki with two roots:

Check out those roots!!

The roots are about an inch long at the moment. What I’ve read online is that you should wait till there are two or three roots at least two inches long before you remove a keiki from the mother plant and pot it on its own. So I’m just gonna let these guys hang out and develop for awhile.

A second Phal that I treated with Keiki Grow Paste is doing pretty well too. This plant has two spikes and I treated both of them.

Double spike, double keiki

One of the keikis on the spike shown on the right in the above photo has started to develop a root:

Baby…root? (Say that in a “Sloth-from-the-Goonies” voice)

And then there this third Phal which has some very lovely keiki foliage sprouting off its spike (at the top and the bottom), but zero root growth to speak of:

Rootless wonders

There you have it. I’m pretty happy with the way this experiment is going so far. I’ve had some luck but I wouldn’t say it’s been a raging success. The true test will come when I’m (hopefully) able to pot the keikis on their own and nurture those babies into full grown bloomers.

I will admit that I got a little nervous about Hurricane Irene last week, seeing as it was barreling toward NYC and I live in one of the evacuation zones (Zone C). Fortunately we didn’t have to evacuate, and the storm wasn’t nearly as bad here as it could have been. I was worried that we’d get all kinda of debris smashing through the windows and destroying my orchid room, but nothing happened. And my orchids live on.  🙂  I hope all of you out there were untouched by the hurricane and that you are safe and sound!

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10 comments

  1. This is fabulous and I’d like to give it a try. I’ve already started shopping around for some Keiki Grow Paste but it’s awfully expensive at $27.95 on the Amazon.com site.

    I wonder if their are some homemade remedies that would or could work just as well. Can you think of any?

  2. I found your keiki growth experiment very interesting. I believe that I have a keiki growth on one of my orchids, but I am not sure. Is there an email address that I could send some of the pics of the growth to verify?

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