My Saga
Hello everyone! My name is Eric and I'm starting to become an orchid addict! ...I hear the first step is admitting you have a problem ;-). I noticed posts on here about how people got started in the hobby, so I thought I would amuse everyone with my story - its probably rather common.
My first orchid was a dendrobium of some sort (purple flowers, very common in garden centers and food stores, etc). I brought it home in this seemingly crappy plastic pot and proceeded to repot it into a nice ceramic pot with fresh potting soil. Immediately it dropped all of its flowers, started turning brown so I thought I hadn't watered it enough - gave it more and put it in sunlight. That plant lasted all of a month.
At this point, I discovered this forum and started realizing that its a bad thing to repot them when flowering (lets not talk about the medium being wrong, no drainage, etc etc etc)... and discovered the beauty of phals. I went to the garden center and picked up a great phal with large white flowers and some buds just about ready to open. This time, I was careful not to repot and left it be. Well, it came with that moss covering the soil, so I left it. I gave it nice baths as the method of watering, thinking that I'm doing things right this time. The buds never opened and fell off, but I enjoyed the flowers for much longer than last time. I continued caring for it, watering, etc even though it was just a clump of green leaves with no more flower stalks forming. The leaves started turning yellow and getting mushy and one by one they fell off until I was left with virtually a stump of nothing. It never grew new leaves, so I'm chaulking this one up to root rot. I later discovered that the likely cause of the buds falling off was due to me placing the plant right near the breezy gusts from my ceiling heating duct. Smart one Eric...
We're now over a year past my first orchid failure, so I picked up another one - it was on sale at Ikea... with this one I had success with the rest of the buds opening and enjoyed the flowers while they lasted. Afterwards the leaves started dying off one by one again - root rot? Bad specimen? Afterall, it only cost me $6 at ikea, so moving on...
Making a really LONG story short, several years later I now have 3 orchids that seem to be surviving well. One still has its flowers (got it recently), the other one (which is technically two in one pot) still has the flower spikes that just branched off new spikes from half way up, so I'm looking forward to this potentially giving me more flowers. The third one is my oldest... I've had it for almost 2 years and over a year and a half of that time I've had no flowers - It was the first plant that I hadn't killed, but also wasn't exactly flourishing. To my surprise, it sent up a flower spike which is now about 2 inches tall - I'm EXTREMELY ecstatic! This orchid has sent up new leafy growth at least 3 or 4 times already with no flower spikes, but ironically, I started to neglect it a little, and let the temperatures get down to the low 60's in my house, and boom... a spike!
Additionally, I stumbled my way onto bigleaforchids.com and ordered myself two seedling crosses that I'm really looking forward to... and so my addiction begins I suppose.
So, thats my introduction folks. Hello everyone! :-)
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