Media Release
Mangaluru, Jan 3: Alia Orchid Care is proud to announce that it has established Post Entry Quarantine (PEQ) incubation facility for live plants in the city. This is the first company in the district to obtain authorization to import species and hybrid orchid plant varieties from across the world.
PEQ facility is the place for observation and incubation of the plants soon after their arrival to India. Plants are released after the concerned department approves that the plants are free from diseases and infection after keeping them under observation for a period of 45-60 days.
It was a long-time dream of Lasrado to have live orchid plants imported from the far-east directly to the city as countries like Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines grow superior quality orchids on a large scale. It was always a great disappointment to receive infected plants from importers from the neighboring state. These infections would rapidly spread to other garden plants and gradually kill 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 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 (seedling stage) to flowering stage on a small scale and have made available to public these orchid plants that are adapted to our coastal temperature. Now Alia Orchid Care team is glad that they can import superior quality and vast varieties of Orchids and grow them in their own farm. At present, around 5,000 Orchid plants are growing on their farm.
Their future aim is to have a tissue culture lab to germinate orchid seeds and propagate orchid plants. This will be beneficial to Indian hobbyists to get rare species at lower price.