What soil for Alocasia?

From: "Adao Pereira" miguelporto at mail.telepac.pt> on 2000.09.20 at 05:47:06(5456) Hello to all! I wonder what type of soil do Alocasias prefer. I used to think that they prefered a light well drained mix, so I used a mix of compost and sand. But when I was in Costa Rica, seeing the plant growing wild, I noticed that the soil is heavy clay, mud! Indeed, the plant that I have growing in clay has bigger leaves... So, what type is the best? Thanks, Miguel

From: "Dany Hervelle" bs246466 at skynet.be> on 2000.09.23 at 18:03:06(5460) Hello Miguel Alocasia prefer a well drained mix,not really important in condition that this let the water go down!I have a large colletion of that genera and all are growing with a mix with a lot of perlit(sometime 50/100 !) The problem with alocasia is that they are very prompt to fungus attack,and a mix that is to compact with addition of a temporal lowest temperature may make die the plants rapidly!I have see also some very large plants that were growing in a not really good draining soil,and like you say the plants,the plants seem growing +More faster and bigger.But there are only some of them who may be growing like this. Most of the alocasia are epyphyte or lythophyte and probably will die rapidly with that kind of growin'.An other solution,if you like large plants,is to contact David scherberich(he is on the list),who is working with the botanical garden of nancy(france);I have see plants there that are really growing large.He say me that he have a special 'mixture'! Dany from Belgium

From: Scherberich earmag at cybercable.tm.fr> on 2000.09.27 at 04:31:05(5468) Warning Could not process message with given Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="Listproc-outter-1966"

Note: this is a very old post, so no reply function is available.