Okay, Lorn. You asked for it...
The flipping thing.
Honestly, I've done it before, too, and for the same reason: better distribution of moisture.
But I am a reluctant flipper, and I have found that by better insulating my baggies, the "need" disappears. I wrap them in a bath towel. The more even temperature does the trick for me.
But still, I can't imagine that a plant doesn't mind being flipped. After all, the plants we deal with are heavily geotropic. That is, they orient themselves according to gravity. I am sure you have read, too, the advice to never change the orientation of scales, once incubating. A bit overzealous, in my opinion, but I think it does have merit. Another interesting experiment to brew: flip one bag every third day (or whatever repetitive interval), and a control bag that is not flipped.
When I have use peat to propagate hybrid lily scales, I have always used the peat one would use to mix with soil. Of course, it's always been fine with vigorous hybrids, but I think milled sphagnum peat is a much better idea.
I tend to use distilled water, too. But I'm not overly fussy.
So often, it's hard to get the right moisture content. With finicky or badly damaged scales, especially, I've devised what I thinks is pretty fool proof. 3/4 rinsed perlite and 1/4 raw sphagnum.
http://garden.org/thread/view_... It teeters on the brink of just moist enough, which is more important with not so vigorous subjects.
The perlite is rinsed to remove most of the fluoride contaminant. The raw sphagum is moistened and tested in the same ways as Lorn suggests. The BIG advantage here is this: if, in time the medium becomes to dry, the color change of the dry raw sphagnum is very easy to detect. It lightens very significantly. The large amount of perlite is present because too much raw sphagnum is too moist for the finicky.
