Dendrobium keikis galore

[catwalker808]

Laserbeak.

You don't say what kind of dendrobium you have. But from the little bits of old canes visible in the upper & lower right corners of photo 2, it looks like a soft cane den nobile type.

The excessive keiki formation is not that unusual, but it's not normal either. The keikis are very dark bright green & look lush & elongated. The keiki formation is probably due to a fertilizer issue. I would say that the following is what happened.

You are probably using a high nitrogen liquid fertilizer or a slow release fertilizer. In New York, if you continued to apply liquid fertilizer after August/September last year (or if you applied a slow release fertilizer that continued to release nitrogen after August/September), you would have interfered with your plant's blooming cycle.

Normally, a cool blooming Den nobile hybrid would initiate buds when temps get into the 50's. Buds would initiate & slowly develop & bloom over the course of a few months. However, if nitrogen fertilizer was either applied or available to the plant during its "rest" period, instead of flowers blooming from the initiated buds, the "buds" would turn into keikis.

Your keikis look like they are several months old. This would coincide with them converting from initiated buds (which should have bloomed in spring) & developing into keikis. Incidentally, this is one way that growers of Den nobile hybrids propagate plantlets of select plants (besides cloning). Mature plants are fed heavily with nitrogen fertilizer in the fall, after canes have matured. Later, the canes are cut up into single nodes. The stored nitrogen fertilizer interferes with normal blooming in the spring & a keiki grows out of every node (where a flower would have normally).

If you continue the same fertilizer & cultural schedule as you did last year, you will probably get the same results next year. No flowers & just lots of keikis instead.