grow orchids

Does buying one and then killing it count? I don’t have much of a green thumb.

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this is in Hawaii

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This plant is maybe 12 years old. It has moved all over the place with me, and lives outside.

Picture quality poor as a cell phone shot

This is Mother’s cattleya – older than I am

This is the season when the night temperature in California where I live falls 20 or more degrees below the day temperature. That means that the orchids I keep outdoors are sending up spikes. Those are the cymbidiums, which come in colors of green, yellow, burgundy, white with tinges of rose, and even rusty colors. My rust one is the first of the season. It has a spike of maybe seven buds, almost all open.

There is a cattleya my father gave my mother when I was born that I now have. In bloom, it has as many as 20 flowers at once.

In my collection are several phaleonopsis which do re-bloom, if you make sure not to let them sit in water at all. Also, miltoneopsis. These are very rewarding, and rebloom nicely. They also are not as fussy.

Oncidiums have also rebloomed for me. And odontoglossom. Brassia.

Here are my secrets, for California and similar areas.

Feed them once in awhile. Monthly is good. Weakly. Some cultivators say “weekly weakly” but I don’t. My mother told me “orchids thrive on neglect” and that is true. Do not over water them. A little spray on the leaves is adequate a lot of the time. Make sure they are not left soppy. Pour off the water after you drench them. If they are doing poorly, don’t feed them, as when they put out new roots, the food could burn them. Try to understand what they don’t like. The like a lot of indirect light, and they like morning light. In the darker months, they can take more direct morning light. Those roots that poke out are their air roots. Healthy orchids of many sorts have air roots – they are for breathing. That is why they cannot sit in water. Many are epiphytes.

If you live somewhere with conditions closer to Hawaii, where it does not freeze, you can actually plant them in trees. The tree and the orchid grow together after a few seasons, and the highest wind will not tear the orchid out of the trees. In Hawaii, we have vanilla orchids, brassia, odontoglossom, oncidiums, zygopetalum, miltonias, and dendrobiums growing in the trees and ferns. There, I feed them with nutricote 14-14-14. I’ve long ago used up my old nylons for this – I tie the pellets of fertilizer into little bundles and put it on the root system, and then cover that up with moss or the hair from the hapu’u.
Then while I am away, the rains gradually dissolve the fertilizer, and I come back to blooming orchids.

There was a great article in today’s New York Times about all of the upcoming orchid shows (Miami, San Francisco, London, etc…)
They all sound fantastic—I’m so looking forward to the day I have a greenhouse to fill, money to burn and a round trip ticket to any of these locations: :)

http://www.orchidsanfrancisco.org/
http://www.southfloridaorchidsociety.org/
http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/

but there are some shoots coming up. Are they leaves or blooms?

to buy another orchid yesterday. I’d like to concentrate on getting one of my orchids to bloom again.