Orchid Procurement Pet Peeves
 

Just wanted to briefly rant about a couple of things that consistently happen to me when buying orchids. Feel free to respond or go on your own self-medicating rant about something entirely different.

1.) Communicating an orchid maturity by pot size, but the put is only half full of orchid. This is straight up lying and it happens a lot. Yesterday it was a 2", but since you dropped the 2" mesh pot into a 4" and surrounded it with fresh bark does not mean its now a 4" plant and you can charge double.

2.) Multiple tiny plants sold as one plant. This sucks because it adds years to the blooming expectancy, again making the maturity value wrong. I know this can happen unintentionally, but I know it happens intentionally too. I just bought a dowiana seedling from a very respected grower that was actually 3 little plants. They were recently mounted so I know the person that did it did it intentionally in order to sell the small ones. This seller publishes a list periodically and this was the last one he had available. Its fraud, I don't need duplicate orchids, I have limited space. I want an orchid that will bloom before I die.

I feel better now.

methinks u should find new vendors. with all the plants we’ve bought over the last 2 (hahah, only 2 mind you) years, we have had 95% arrive in as advertised or better condition. care to name your vendors??!

we have purchased from around 10 different companies or private sellers. only 1 we would not buy from again, and that person was not an actual publicized vendor.

if i had to find something to complain about it is that the plants came in packed sphag. not a real complaint tho, obvs. of all the plants i have ever bought in my life, clearly orchid growers take their biz much more seriously than the average plant nurseries

edit to add...sorry your experiences aren’t the best, and hopefully they get better....

I am very active on the vendors feedback section. Seattle Orchids and Orchids.com were properly put on blast (don't buy from them people). I had a couple bad Ecuagenera shipments that were eventually refunded, had many good shipments as well. Miranda Orchids sent me some very undersized plants, they told me I will get new ones from their new batch but that remains to be seen. I even had a not-great shipment from SVO that was, of course, benevolently resolved by Fred.

I didn't complain to the vendor that supplied the Dowiana 'Rosita" I mention in my OP so I don't feel comfortable naming them since I didn't give them a chance to resolve. They grow some varieties that I want to acquire so I am not ready to burn that bridge (yet).

oh man, well even tho we don’t buy plants from the states, i have never heard anything good about seattle. it’s amazing to me that a plant biz with that much negative fdbk is able to stay in business. perhaps they have another, unadvertised side of their business that is their actual moneymaker...and the orchid sales are just a front?! joking, but i have often wondered about them.

in germany many of the vendors have been around a long time and so we tend to order only from the main ones. once we got a few plants from a private seller, who i also won’t name, and they were all quite small (which we knew going in) but basically only one of the plants we got survived. these plants should have lived. so something was off with them, and it just was a learning experience to stick with the mainstream established growers. when we get similar plants from big vendors they all do just fine.

perhaps my biggest complaint is about Angela six, a phal species specialist here. the one order we placed with her was for 3 micholtzii seedlings. over a week later i get a nasty email about making the payment. i thought i was going crazy because i had in fact paid for the order right away. i asked her to double check, as possibly the transfer didn’t go or something happened, she just said yes, you paid, and sent the plants. not a huge deal as the plants are great, but i realize that plant people may not always be the best people people. and also, germans can have a direct way of communicating!

Seattle is actually one of the USA's great cities and some of my favorite music from my childhood was spawned there, but the name is being marred by Seattle Orchids lol. They make money by selling recently de-flasked seedlings as "near blooming size".

Orchids.com overcomes their horrible reputation and practices because they have the orchids.com domain.

There's a few 'solutions' to these problems:
1. Ask if a plant is blooming size [BS], near blooming size [NBS] or seedling size [SS]--these are all fairly quantified distinctions in reputable orchid nursery speak--given suitable care, BS will bloom in the current year or on the next mature growth; NBS can be expected to bloom in the next 18-24 months; SS, it's a crapshoot.
2. Research to see which nurseries are simply pass-through operations or flippers--a good rule of thumb: if you see a bunch of listings on ebay/etsy for a particular plant and the same plant available at a bunch of nurseries, said nurseries are candidates for your pass-through list. The 'mature' & bulk lot lists from Hawaii come out every 10-14 days from grower collectives, while the import/export lots usually ramp up in advance of the major orchid shows in the US [ie POE, Huntington International, Redlands, etc.] Once you know where/how to search, you'll recognize who's who.
3. Buy in person.

ahhh, i see how my poor communication caused a little confusion. i Love seattle as well, it IS a cool city! (and yes, grunge was where it was at back in the day). i only meant seattle orchids! soory

I see this on ebay alot. I do get annoyed when they buy from another seller, immediately pot it up from 2" to 4" and sell it for double. Mostly because they don't seem to care about plants. I'd never sell/give away freshly potted plants because it often can't take the stress into a new environment. If they must, they should note that. Personally, that makes me mad. Now I just buy directly from the original grower/seller, even though there may be a minimum.



I see this time to time from "reputable sellers". I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, and it's usually multiple divisions in a pot to make it look large. I haven't complained since mine have grown and flowered quickly, even as 3-bulb divisions stuck together to sell as a 7" plant..... but yeah, as a seedling, that sucks.

I've become set on a few sellers now, which of course includes Fred.