Mangaluru: The Alia Orchid Care has established a Post Entry Quarantine (PEQ) incubation facility for live plants in Mangalore. They also happen to be the first company in the district to have obtained an authorisation to import species and hybrid orchid plant varieties from across the world.
PEQ facility is a place for observation and incubation of the plants soon after their arrival in the country. These plants are released only after obtaining an approval from the department concerned that the plants are free from diseases and infection by keeping them under observation for a period of 45-60 days.
Lasrado of Alia Orchid Care cherished the dream of having live orchid plants imported from far- east countries, especially Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines which are known for the superior quality orchids grown here, directly to Mangalore. It was always a great disappointment to receive infected plants from the importers of neighbouring state since these infections would rapidly spread on to other garden plants, gradually killing other plants as well.
Most of the people are ignorant of these plant sap feeding insects like scale, mealybugs, aphids, thirps, spider mites and white flies; bacterial diseases like Erwinia, Acidovorax, black rot like Phythium and phytophothora and Fungul diseases like Fussarium and Rhizoctonia. These are the major challenges faced by the garden enthusiasts especially orchid hobbyists as orchid species and rare variety plants are very expensive. Moreover, they are not available in India whenever people want them.
All these years, they have cultivated hybrids from baby plants (seedlings stage) to flowering stage in small scale and have made available to public these orchid plants that are adapted to the coastal temperature.
Now, Alia Orchid Care is directly importing vast varieties of orchids of a superior quality and growing them in their own farm. At present, they are growing about 5000 orchid plants in their farm.
In future they aim to have a tissue culture lab to germinate the orchid seeds and propagate orchid plants. This will be beneficial to Indian hobbyists to get rare species at lower price.
