Re-kokedama-ing

I'm not sure if that's actually a real word, but I am going to use "kokedama" as a verb as that's exactly what I had to do!  I had a feeling I had overwatered my kokedama orchid, so I had to unwrap all that twine and take out all of that soil that was in there. 

I'm learning as I'm going along with these orchids.  It seems that they need to stay dry most of the time, but at the same time still needs to be watered/stay moist.  Gosh, so complicated!

Anyway, as suspected - there is root rot inside of the kokedama ball:

I've seen videos where they've actually put "peanut" packaging in between the roots but since I don't have any of that I'm using some of these bonsai soil instead.  They are sort of pebble-y, so hopefully that will drain the water nicely in the between the roots:

Fingers crossed this kokedama will work better this time.  It is at least half the size of what it was before!

I do have some orchid bark coming soon so if this doesn't work, we will just have to unwrap the whole thing again (or re-kokedama as I put it :-) and see if this orchid survives.  So far all the flowers have dropped off except for 2. Obviously a few more have dropped since this photo was taken:

I do see one new little flower twig/bud that's sprouting.  So maybe something is working??! I do need to mist it more perhaps - supposed to do it every day as the air is so dry here.  Or maybe I should just give up on orchids as they seem to be such high maintenance plants!

At least the other kokedama plants are doing well and I found a solution for those little gnats flying around too.  I found this sticky thingy in the form of a butterfly that actually looks decent while being stuck into one of the kokedamas:

In the meantime, I have also bought a new African Violet for the new plant hanger in the kitchen. The other plant looked that I had in there looked really sad.  This violet reminds me about the one that I once had in Broken Arrow (near Tulsa) when we lived there.  I had this special pot for it too and it had a massive bloom.  But unfortunately we couldn't bring it to Abu Dhabi when we moved so I had to sell it/give it away:

I'm hoping this one will grow nicely here.  At least it's something nice to look at while I'm doing dishes :-)