Yard Dendrobiums

[voyager]

Well, it looks as if spring is arriving around here. The citrus and avo' trees are in various state of bloom. My cool-dry-rest type Dendrobiums have also begun to bloom, at least those that look as if they'll bloom at all for the conditions here. I'll post in another thread about those that do not seem to like our cool-not so dry-rest winters here.

So, first up is, Den. primulinum

I had forgotten why I liked this species so much other than it s pretty flowers. I do not think very highly about its fragrance, what I call "that rancid Dendrobium smell". A few others have a very similar smell to them.
What I really like about this species is that I have found that that it seems to increase in size from 1-1/2 to 2X each season. It had 1 PB last season, 2 this season and if it follows the usual pattern, it should have 3 to 4 PBs next season, then somewhere between 5 and 8 PBs the next season , and so on. Growing this one in my living room back in AK, that was the pattern it followed. It looks to be doing the same here.


Then, Den. anosmum

I held off getting pics of this one while waiting for the buds on the upper smaller canes to open. The lower flowers on the long cane have begun to drop, can't wait for the others to open. I still like the darker more reddish purple colored blossoms better than these lighter more bluish colored flowers. I'm still looking for one of those. You can smell raspberries as you walk by this one.

Then, Den. Samurai


I have 4 separate mounts of these scattered around the yard. This group is the most vigorous of them all. I'm still watching for some of these to start popping up in new locations as it turns into the "weed orchid" I expect it to.

And, finally, Den. attenatum "Maku'u"


This is one of the parent species plants for the previous plant, Den. Samurai. The other parent species for that plant is Den. stratiotes.

[Pattywack]

Beautiful! They all are amazing and the raspberry fragrance would be wonderful!

I currently have snow covering my yard this spring:/

Thanks for sharing!

[No-Pro-mwa]

Beautiful as usual.

[orion141]

Gorgeous! I too have a snow covered yard to start spring :/

[Dollythehun]

Beautiful! No snow here, just rain.

[voyager]

You guys have got it good. I was working out in the yard yesterday. It was 96°F. I almost succumbed to heat stroke.
Had to drink almost a quart and a half of water to rehydrate myself.

Butter left out on the counter melted into a puddle. No more soft easy to spread butter. Were going to have to start keeping it in the fridge again.

The cats run from one shady spot to the next as they travel around the yard, then sit in the shade and pant.

I do miss how the cooler temps invigorate you and make you feel more alive. This heat just saps your energy.

I can whine and cry all I want. Just don't ask me to trade.

[Dog Glooay Mai]

Always love your yard orchid pics. We picked up a couple of bare root primilinium clumps in bud last month. Got them mounted out in the yard and they flowered really nicely and now are quickly growing several new canes. Really one of my favorites. Waiting on my aphyllum which has 50-60 buds and a hercoglossum with 15 or so, my first dry season dendobriums that have ever raised, very exciting. Thanks again for all your interesting pics!

[voyager]

Originally Posted by Dog Glooay Mai

Always love your yard orchid pics. We picked up a couple of bare root primilinium clumps in bud last month. Got them mounted out in the yard and they flowered really nicely and now are quickly growing several new canes. Really one of my favorites. Waiting on my aphyllum which has 50-60 buds and a hercoglossum with 15 or so, my first dry season dendobriums that have ever raised, very exciting. Thanks again for all your interesting pics!

My pleasure, any excuse to walk around and look at my orchids and then tell someone about them, whose eyes don't roll back in their head.

D. primulinums are a very satisfying orchid to grow, except for their fragrance. I will always hold that against them. The one I have here has a more cigar shaped PB than the one I had back in AK. But it still blooms prolifically with an almost exact duplicate flower.

I grew to love the Dendrobiums from my early exposure to Nobile hybrids. Then, I tried a few pendant Dendrobiums and really found my calling, the large pendant Dendrobium section species, most [many?] of which are the cool-dry-rest types from the monsoonal climate of the Himalayan foothills.

In my original post in this thread, I alluded to some of them that seem to not like our climate here. I took some pics, but decided to hold off to give them a chance to maybe bloom yet. So far, D. pendulum, D. loddigesii, and a D. farmeri X D. Mousmee[D. thyrsiflorum X D. furcatum] are resisting blooming.

The D. pendulum and the D. loddigesii are now keiki-ing madly where blossoms should be forming. The D. farmeri X D. Mousmee's nodes are swelling but then stall and are not developing into buds or keikis, just as it did last year and the year before. I'll wait a while longer to be sure that it won't do any better than the previous years. Then, I'll start to explore reasons why they aren't doing so well here, then see if I can manipulate conditions for them. With little doubt it is tied to temps and moisture. My location is probably too warm and/or too wet for them in the winter.

My Laissez-faire attitude towards my yard orchids might need to be changed to get results from these particular Dendrobiums. That idea gives me nightmares when I think of how much effort I used to put into growing them in Alaska. I will not get to that point again! That's a good part of the reason why I moved here.

[Dog Glooay Mai]

Yeah, Voyager, I tell ya, I'm startin to quite like the dry rest pendulant Dens. I can definitely see why you like them so much. The hercoglossum I got which may actually be a parishii, the vendor told me it was a parishii (but the flowers were too small and looked like Herco's) have about 12 buds that just keep getting bigger and bigger and it may be that the plant is a parishii after all. It seems to like life up in the northeast more than with the grower in central Thailand, around Bangkok, so maybe the flower size was stunted by some unfavorable conditions down there. The aphyllum with 50-60 buds just keeps developing and developing so far without any hitch and as of yesterday is sending out new canes, so I am confident this will be an awesome flowering, for sure within the month. I will post photos of it and most of my yard orchids when that happens, all that is very long in the tooth.

I am still so happy that my first crack at dry resting is turning out to have worked, very rewarding and hard to do just not water your plants and it was a confusing time trying to re-start them. It was getting so hot and dry 95-98 degrees and sunny that I thought I had better start watering despite no signs of growth. Seems*to have worked, maybe I was just lucky.

We are lowland tropics, northeast Thailand, fairly close to Laos, so like you, Dendrobiums like farmerii probably won't flower, unless they get stuck in the refrigerator at night or whatever it is people do to get them to flower in hotter climes, they are native to the mountains in the north of Thailand, but we are on the hot plains to the east, it doesn't get cold enough most winters. This year we only had a week where it got down to 60 degrees, and that was the extent of it, cooler at night but 68-70 degrees at night as opposed to now where it only gets into the upper 80's at night, and 100-105 in the day, though two years ago we had some freakishly chilly weather, two weeks in the low fifties at night, and a couple of days when it cracked the 40's, so it may be possible with some luck to grow some of the mountain dendrobiums down here in the flatlands.

So that may be why my jenkensii and aggregatum didn't flower, too warm this winter, but both were such cool looking plants that I didn't listen to the vendor when he said many of his customers complain to him about these, that they won't flower for them. Maybe there is still time for them, but i omehow sense it isn't going to happen this year. I also have a unicuum which was quite spindly but in flower and still quite charismatic when I bought it last June. I never resolved how best to take of it but decided to just reduce watering rather pulling the plug. I don't know as of yet how that approach will pan out, I am on full program watering and fertilizing and he finally responded last week with a new cane, maybe that means come June it will flower, I haven't able to find much info on unicuum, but it is another quite gorgeous dendrobium if quite different from the pendulant dens such as primilinium, aphylum, et al.

Vandas and Cattleyas and Dendrobium Phals mostly do pretty well with the fairly horrifically hot weather we have, so they are like weeds that you have water all the time. We have Aerides falcata growing wild in our trees but it is not nearly as attractive to me as the cane dendrobiums which do not if they ever did grow around here in the woods. I keep seeing Bulbophyllums for sale in not very good shape, though I still hope to one day try those.

[voyager]

@ Dog Glooay Mai

OK you've got me started now.

Wintering the cool-dry-rest types in-home in Alaska was actually quite easy.
Outdoor temps ran sub zero very regularly, that's the robust 0°F, not that whiny little 0°C. [I have not lost my snobbish Alaskan view of the rest of the world yet. It comes from living in and enjoying the climate and conditions up there.]
It was easy to get the lower winter temps by using a programmable thermostat set in the 60 to 65°F range for nights.

Moisture was a bit more difficult. Household air was always very dry, especially when the cold dry arctic air moved down out of the interior. You'd get strong static zaps every time you walked even a little ways across the floor, shoes, socks, or bare feet, made no difference. I swore a lot every winter due to those zaps. A humidifier rated at 7gal/day in a 900sqft living area would cut the frequency and strength of the zaps, but couldn't add enough moisture to do the orchids any good. I'd still need to do misting and watering estimated by the plants health and recommendations for its culture. It was a balancing act that I was able to tune into. But, I could never really explain to someone how I actually made it work. One thing I learned is that often trade offs can be made between temps and moisture. "If you can't get the temps down as low as recommended, then dry it out a bit more" often made the difference.

Now, I'm at 800' elevation on the windward side. I'm on the cusp of USDA zones 12a and 12b. winter night temps get down to 64°F quite regularly with a very few forays as low as 60°F to 56°F. This is fairly comparable to what I could get back in AK, if not a bit cooler.

Even though we're in a drought phase right now, it is still "wet" here. Humidity goes to 100% almost every night and dew forms making everything wet until the day dries it all out, by about 8am or later. And it still rains heavily about once a week.

I could never get any of the Calista types to bloom in Alaska. My Dendrobiums chrysotoxum and aggregatum bloom nicely here. They're both in bud right now. My feeling though, is that they could do even better if they were kept a bit drier, maybe even a bit cooler.

Figuring the Den. farmeri X Den. Mousmee is a bit more difficult. The parent species, Den's frameri, thyrsiflorum, and fulcatum all want drying out. farmeri and thyrsiflorum like temps down into the mid 40°F while fulcatum only wants the low in the low 60°F. With 2 out of three wanting the mid 40°F, it is likely that this hybrid may want temps approaching that low range also. But, getting it to dry out more than it has been doing, might be enough to get it to flower. I'm thinking of trying to shelter it from the rains so that it only gets the morning dews. But, I don't want to remove it from the palm it's now mounted on. But, I might do that as a last resort.

Vandas and Catts are relatively no-brainers around here, just throw them into the air and yell "FLY!". That seems to work pretty good for most of the ones I've mounted around the yard.

My greatest complaint about living here is that the importation of orchids is very restricted, supposedly to protect the large numbers of commercial breeders and growers here. All that is easily acquired locally are hybrids. Species plants are hard to find. You have to go through the whole CITES 10-step shuffle just to bring anything in, even from the mainland. Then, there are all the horror stories about trying to place orders from Asia. I really want to enlarge my Dendrobium species collection to what it was and even more. It doesn't look as if I'll be able to do it here. They were easier to obtain from Alaska that from here in Hawaii.

OK, I'll stop my tirade here rather than going on with it.

	Mistking Looking for a misting system? Look no further. Automated misting systems from MistKing are used by multitude of plant enthusiasts and are perfect for Orchids. Systems feature run dry pumps, ZipDrip valve, adjustable black nozzles, per second control! Automatically mist one growing shelf or a greenhouse full of Orchids. See MistKing testimonials