I was one who recommended te keiki paste. As long as the leaf and stem are
still good, I'd still give it a try for the practice if nothing else. The
3rd bud up usually gives the best results. With tweezers or good fingernails
you can start at the peak of the shield and try to tear off 1/2 of the
pyramidal shield tissue. You'll easily see the bud underneath. Then take off
the other half. Or you can try to take hold of one corner of the base of the
pyramid and pull straight across to remove the entire shield at once. I
think that's harder. Then with a toothpick or similiar sized instrument,
smear on a very thin layer of the paste (you shouldn't be able to see the
paste when you're done). Neatness doesn't count. Et voila, you're done.
You'll notice within a week if something is going to happen or not. Good
luck.
Gary

"J Fortuna" wrote in message
news:TkFKf.16211$dO2.9485@trnddc07...
Some of you may recall that I once asked about a phal schilleriana that
has only one leaf left and that developed a spike. I was advised by
someone here to try using keiki grow, and I even bought it, but alas the
spike is so thin that I did not know how to go about peeling the node, and
so I did not try the keiki paste.

I let it flower, since I figured that this is probably it's last effort,
and might as well let it go out with a bang. Today the first flower
opened, and it's badly mutated. It looks to me like its lip fused with the
two lateral sepals, so it only has a dorsal sepal, 2 petals, and one lower
sepal-lip thingie. I generally like peloric Phals, but this stress-caused
mutation is a sad sight. I don't really think that it will get better, but
I am reluctant to throw it out while there is that one healthy looking
leaf. Still hoping for a miracle, I guess.

Fortunately I have a lot of healthy Phals and many of them are in flower
or in spike, so in general I am pleased with my collection's performance,
but I still can't help being a bit sad about this one.

It's just a seedling really, I got it as a seedling in October 2003 at the
NCOS show in DC. By March 2005 it had already lost all but one of its
leaves, probably due to cold -- I only later found out that schilleriana
is even more cold sensitive and so are seedlings, so a schilleriana
seedling is likely to fare poorly in temperature where other Phals are
still ok. Then this one-leafed seedling hung on to its life for the last
year, and I kept hoping that it would still pull through somehow, but now
I don't have much hope left for it anymore.

Joanna