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Hi all. I am trying LECA for the first time on three Alocasias I got… | Hydroponics & Semi-hydroponics | Planta-community

Krista

Hi all. I am trying LECA for the first time on three Alocasias I got in the mail. The one on the far left is a stingray, the middle one is a grey dragon, and the right one is a black velvet. I put them in the LECA 5 days ago on the 11th and used distilled water with diluted Super Thrive. The black velvet seems to be just fine. The grey dragon seems a little in shock. The stingray though is looking horrible. It also looks like it has rot on the stem above the LECA? I am pretty sure it wasn’t there when I received it. My question is how long should I give a plant to see if it adjusts to the LECA and recovers? Should I move the stingray back to soil before any more damage happens and try again at a later date once it settles into its new home? Also, how watered up to 1/3 of the container. Should the water touch the bottom roots or should it be below them? I also added more yesterday because it got pretty low in the meantime. Edit: I tried to post this yesterday but it seemed to have failed. Since then I remove the rotted plant from the stingray and it was fully rotten, all the way down. I cleaned the LECA and put the remaining good stem back in for now.

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9 reacties

  1. Vera

    Yay for semi hydro! So the first thing is for Alocasias, I would recommend a submerged to set up. That’s where you have one cache pot with nutrient solution and then the LECA/plant is in a secondary container. If not, they will be prone to the same issues they have in soil, namely, root rot. I’ll add a picture of what I use for my plants below. Did you acclimate these plants to semi Hydro at all? Or did you transition them straight from soil? If you transition straight from soil, they will usually drop most of their leaves and throw a huge hissy fit before coming back. If the stingray is still doing really poorly, I would recommend just cleaning off anything that is rotted and placing him in Fluval stratum. If you do that, you can set it up exactly as you have it here, with the 1/3 water and the Stratum.

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    • Vera

      These are the containers I love to use.

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    • Vera

      They’re $15 for a dozen on Amazon.

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    • Vera

      Here are some plantlets in Fluval stratum. Same setup as what you have above— this works really well for corms or if you have a struggling planned or a plant that needs to develop a semi hydro adapted root system.

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    • Krista

      Hi Vera. Thank you for the really detailed replies. I transitioned them straight from soil. I have added the plastic cache pots you showed to my wishlist on Amazon. I didn’t do cache pots for two reasons: they seemed pretty expensive and I like the look of the LECA and roots in a clear container :). However, I do like the look and price point of these, so I will get them when I have money again. I didn’t think about the Fluval/perlite combo for transitioning plants to semi-hydro. I have been considering it for propagations though. Yeah, that stingray was weird. It was two plants in one, and one just has some slight drooping from the change, but the other one completely rotted out. As said above, I completely removed the rotting one and put the good one in new LECA. I made sure to get all of the soil off the roots before I placed them in LECA, but the plants had a little shipment stress, so maybe the one that rotted had a cut or something 🤷‍♀️?

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  2. ToPlantHarmony

    With my alocasias I keep the reservoir level at maybe 1/4 or 1/5 because they don’t seem to like too much water. I don’t let the soil roots touch water at all once they’re in LECA. For my alocasias, once they’re happy they have actually grown water roots very quickly.

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    • Krista

      I will try and keep the water level just below the roots then. It’s a little nerve wracking because the balls above the water line look so dry 😬. I know LECA works by capillary action, but still. Aside from that one stingray, the rest of the plants seem to have stabilized so far. I did get a ton of new plants and alocasias since then, but I put them all in soil 😆. I figured I would let them recover from shipping first, then try to transition them with the Fluval/perlite method. Maybe I should try though with a different family. I think I heard pothos and Hoyas accept LECA pretty readily?

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  3. Bella56

    When switching mediums like soil to water you’re basically regrowing the plant. It’s common for the roots to rot and it will grow water roots, the leaves (sometimes all) may also fall off. If you move the sting ray back to soil it’s just going to stress the plant out even more. At this point you have to let them acclimate to the change.

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    • Krista

      Thank you for the reply. I ended up removing the stingray that rotted because it was completely rotten. The other stingray I moved to clean LECA and it seems ok so far, just maybe a little droopy. I inspected its roots though during the move and I didn’t see any signs of rotting.

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