Month: May 2021

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What kinds of pots to use for growing orchids?

There are three main types of pots, and have different characteristics that you’ll want to keep in mind.  All three types come in a range of sizes and variations, but the key idea is that they affect water evaporation from the media differently.

The three kinds are:

1) Plastic

2) Wooden/air slat and net pots

3) Terra cotta (unglazed)

All orchid pots need to have drainage.  Many decorative vases do not have any drainage holes, and growing orchids in containers with no drainage is not something I’d recommend (although I’ve seen it done before, usually by some clueless grower, and always leave puzzled as to why it worked for that plant).  You can use a decorative vase if you keep the orchid in a plastic pot that fits inside the vase.  When you need to water, just take the plant in the plastic pot out.

PLASTIC POTS

Plastic pots are cheap, abundant, and reusable.  They also work very well.  Just select the right size pot for your plant’s root system (not too big, and not too small), fill it with your plant and moistened media (this tip is for new growers who may not know to do this).

WOODEN AIR SLAT POTS AND PLASTIC NET POTS

These aren’t really pots so much as open-air receptacles for holding orchids.  You use this kind of container when you want a lot of air movement around your orchid and extra aeration at the root zone.  Many growers prefer to use sphagnum moss in these slat/net pots, but if you use a fine mesh liner, you can use bark as well. 

The thing to keep in mind is that the media will dry out much more quickly in these slat/net pots, and that’s kind of the point.  Growing in pots like this, especially hung outside under shade, means you’ll get lots of air movement around the plant and the media, and hence plenty of evaporation.  This high rate of evaporation means you can water more frequently, and if the plant is growing well, you can get some very robust growth for orchids suited to this style of growing (not all are).  Generally epiphytic orchids will do very well grown like this.

UNGLAZED TERRA COTTA POTS

Many skilled orchid growers prefer using unglazed terra cotta pots.  They’re cheap and easy to find.  Unglazed terra cotta has one tremendous advantage over the other pot types: the micropores in the terra cotta wick away moisture from the media AND reduce the temperature at the root zone.  With good air movement around the pot, you’ll have essentially created an evaporative cooler for your orchid!  

While many orchids don’t really care too much about what kinds of pots their grown in, one of the best Masdevallia growers I’ve known grew all of his Masdies and Pleurothallids in unglazed terra cotta.  He used New Zealand Sphagnum Moss (often with a Styrofoam peanut(s) at the bottom of the pot), and the plants grew to perfection.  Of course, his greenhouse conditions also contributed mightily to his success, but a home grower can do well with unglazed terra cotta, too.

If you grow in an area that is generally known to be too hot to grow, say, Masdevallias, growing in terra cotta might just work.  I read years ago of some growers in Louisiana who did just this, growing Masdevallias mounted to terra cotta shingles.  Certainly worth trying if you live in a hot area but have become obsessed with some cool-growing orchids!

One key concept here: the more evaporative your pot, the more often you can water. The more often you can water (without keeping the roots overly wet), the faster the plant can take up nutrients and grow.  If you had a plant growing in media/pot/conditions that you could water in the morning, and would dry out to mild dampness by evening, AND the plant was receiving enough light to photosynthesize at an optimal rate, in theory you could water every day and get some amazing growth.  This is an experiment I’ve had in mind for quite some time, and once we set it up and get some long-term results, we’ll definitely post it on our website (orchidinsanity.com).

I suspect that many orchids in the jungle naturally experience this kind of near-optimal growth conditions – aerated roots, high humidity, the right amount of light, and daily rain, picking up plenty of detritus, dead bugs, and bird poop for nutrition.

Anyways, all that being said, plastic pots work just fine.  If you’re a new grower, start with regular plastic pots.  While it is tempting to try the other types of pots with all this talk of evaporative cooling and optimal growth, the other kinds of pots have too many variables to think about for an inexperienced grower, and when you’re starting out, you want to reduce the number of variables to a bare minimum so that you can develop a baseline of experience for what works for you.  I wish I had done this when I first started out, but I was too excited about optimizing conditions when, really, I hardly had any experience.  It was a very costly mistake, and a lot of orchid paid with their lives because of my impatience and ineptitude.

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Dogs, cats, dolphins & orchids

A frequent lament I hear goes like this: “I’ve had other orchids before, but why won’t this one grow?”

This is like saying, “I’ve had other mammals before, but what’s wrong with this one?” A more specific example: “I’ve had dogs (a kind of mammal) before, but why won’t these cats (or raccoons, or bears, or tigers, or dolphins, or seals) respond the same way?”

When you hear the word “orchid” in reference to this Family of plants, it is helpful to think of the word “mammals”*. Just as there are thousands of different types of mammals in the world occupying practically every climatic zone, there are around 30,000 known orchid species on the planet (and hundreds of thousands of hybrids bred over the years), occupying every climatic zone (except for the arctic/antarctic).

While it is certainly possible to make general statements about orchids, you can mislead yourself if you start to think too broadly about “orchids” and start thinking that what works for Phalaenopsis hybrids from the supermarket is going to work for equally well for more rare (and interesting) orchid types. In fact, even the ancestral Phalaenopsis species from the jungle (from which the supermarket Phal hybrids were bred) may not do well in typical home conditions.

So if you’re struggling with an orchid, you’ll need to understand the type of orchid, and preferably the genus. The genus (a group of related species). Learning about how the plants in a particular genus grow will help you to understand the needs of your particular orchid.

That being said, two things that will help practically all orchids are 1) higher humidity, into the 75% – 95% relative humidity level, and 2) high-quality water (e.g., collected rainwater, reverse osmosis-purified water, or distilled water). More on the importance of both of these factors in future posts…

*Mammals are of the Class Mammalia, which is actually a couple of steps above Family in terms of biological classifications.

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Growing instructions for Dendrobium kingianum, the easiest orchid on earth (and our top-selling orchid)

Dendrobium kingianum hails from eastern Australia, a country where everything is tough, just like this orchid.  It is probably the hardiest orchid you’ll come across, and is very easy to grow.  (These instructions apply to Den. speciosum and Den. delicatum as well.

This is NOT a fussy plant.  You can grow it in a pot with almost any kind of media: moss, bark, or if you’re feeling very cheap, even gravel. (There’s a reason it’s also called the Rock Orchid because it grows on rocks!)  You can also grow it mounted on a slab of bark or wood with moss around the roots, where it will make a wonderful, attractive display.   You can even grow it in a bottle full of water!  (No, I’m not kidding.)  If your cane does not have roots, it means it was freshly harvested, and it will root in a few weeks if you put it in a cup with about ½-inch of water.

Water your plant once or twice per week, depending on your media.   You can fertilize every other watering with any kind of plant food.  In early November, STOP WATERING and put it outside (or expose it to cooler nighttime temperatures, but do not allow it to freeze!)  It is this drying out and cold drop that stimulates blooming in the early spring.  Once you see a new flower spike form, you can resume watering.  If, psychologically, you have a hard time not watering (hey, I know it can go against your grain), at least strongly REDUCE your watering!  Misting is a good compromise…

If you purchased the small canes from us, it will establish best in sphagnum moss. Once this kind of plant gets rolling, however, the type of media doesn’t matter so much. But they do like moss when they’re small.

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Questions to Ask About Any Orchid Advice You’re Given

We have a couple of posts on why orchid info on the web is so bad, wrong, or unreliable. You can see them here and here. They’ll give you helpful background info on this topic.

Because there’s so much either bad/wrong advice on orchids, or good advice that simply may not apply to you (for different reasons), below are some questions you should ask first. Your goal is to find out whether the advice applies to you and your growing situation.

Who is giving the advice? What kind of experience do they have? How long have they been growing?  These are the obvious questions to ask.

Where in the country (or world) is this person growing their orchids?  For example, indoor orchid growers in in MN (and there are plenty) cannot readily use advice given by growers in FL about sticking orchids outside. Some growers literally live in a rainforest (e.g., parts of HI, much of Brazil, etc.) and their advice needs to be taken with care, as anything they do probably works by virtue of the fact that they live in a rainforest.

Are the growing conditions like yours?  Is this person growing in a home or in a greenhouse? Or are they growing in a small greenhouse setup in inside a home, and they failed to mention this?  The kind of mix you use, and the frequency of watering, all depend on answers to these kinds of questions.

What kinds of orchids does this person grow?  How long have they grown them? Plenty of people are successful with, say, Phalaenopsis, but what applies to supermarket Phals may not apply to esoteric, deciduous Dendrobiums. One tell-tale of a know-it-all who doesn’t actually know all that much is if they refer to “orchids” too categorically, as if all orchids need exactly the same conditions. That’s like saying all mammals need the same conditions and care. A really experienced grower will go into detail about specific types of orchids by genera (e.g., Dendrobium, Paphiopedilum, Cattleya, Oncidium, etc.) and qualify at least some of their statements for specific types of orchids because they have experience with them. A self-declared expert (there are so many in the orchid world, it’s unbelievable) who has grown 18 supermarket Phals successfully in Florida might give you reasonable info on growing Phals in the home, but that info might get you in trouble if you’re trying to grow miniature Oncidiums mounted on wood slabs in Michigan.

The real issue is whether the advice-giver is tailoring their advice to someone with your growing conditions (preferably, similar geography) and your experience level. Advice from one expert to another is not necessarily the best advice for a new grower.

When I was a new grower, I bought hook-line-and-sinker into some wonderful postings of some people’s results growing in semi-hydro. It sounded incredible — the lush leaves, the number of flowers, the ease of growth, etc. I switched my whole collection (about 30 plants at the time) to semi-hydro. It was a complete failure, and I ended up killing a bunch of those plants, and setting back growth on the ones that survived. It’s not that semi-hydro doesn’t work, it’s that I wasn’t ready for that kind of info at my level of growing experience. I didn’t realize how bad my town’s water quality was for orchids, nor did I understand about seasonality of re-potting, that orchids make roots specific to a type of media (and going from bark to semi-hydro during the wrong season was not going to work well), etc. I simply wasn’t ready for that style of growing, and that kind of information at my limited experience with orchids led me to disaster.

If I only knew to ask the right kinds of questions, maybe I wouldn’t have failed so miserably… But then you wouldn’t have the benefit of my mistakes.

So when you watch/read/hear orchid advice on the web (or anywhere), ask these questions before you act on it. Make sure the advice applies to your growing conditions, your growing location, and your level of growing experience!

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Another reason orchid advice on the web is unreliable, bad, or wrong

(Scroll to the bottom for the TL;DR)

On the web, there are plenty of people trying to make a few bucks by cutting-and-pasting someone else’s info, making a few edits, and then calling it their own.  Some folks have turned this into quite an operation for fields that are info-rich, orchids being a great example. You could do the same with, say, information about dogs. You don’t need to know anything about dogs, except that there are plenty of people searching for info on dogs out there, and hence, plenty of internet traffic on the topic. So you make a list of all dog breeds, a list of common dog ailments, a list of dog training info, etc. Next, make a free website on blogspot or similar, and make pages for each of the topics on your lists. Then start scouring the web for info that you can literally cut-and-paste onto your website. Finally, set up Google Ads on your website, and wait for the money train to start rolling in!

The only work you’re doing is giving your wrist a good work out with all that cutting-and-pasting, but voila, you’re now an Internet “Authority” on dogs. No need to actually have owned a dog, much less become knowledgeable about Dalmatians and their inherited diseases, or training a dog to balance a book on his head and walk across the room, or whether meat-only diets are really good for your dog. Just cut-and-paste other people’s hard-won knowledge WITH NO ATTRIBUTION, re-arrange a few words here and there, and wait for the search engines to rank your page high.

An astute reader can usually spot this kind hack work right away. Cut-and-paste artists like this trying to put out stuff on orchids usually sound very formulaic, as a lot of their stuff is lifted out of Wikipedia, (where most of the info is quite dry, no pun intended) or from IOSPE, the Internet Orchid Species Page, a helpful resource for orchid species devotees.

Here’s something on the species Dendrobium linawianum from a site that shows up on orchid name searches:

Dendrobium linawianum also called as Linawi’s Dendrobium, Callista linawiana, Dendrobium alboviride, Dendrobium purpureum, Ormostema purpurea, is a species of the genus Dendrobium. This species was described by Heinrich Gustav Reichenbach in 1861.

Dendrobium linawianum is found only Taiwan and Kwangsi province in southern China. It grows usually on tree trunks in broadleaf forests at elevations of 400 to 1500 meters above sea level.

Now, here’s the entry on this species from IOSPE:

Found only Taiwan and Kwangsi province in southern China usually in broadleaf forests at 400 to 1500 meters in elevation as a small to medium sized, hot to cool growing epiphyte with clustered, branching, slightly flattened, yellow brown, lustrous stems that are slightly swollen apically and have a pseudobulb-like swelling below carrying a 6 to 7, coriaceous, narrowly elliptical to oblong, 2 ranked, apcailly unequally emarginate leaves that blooms in the late winter and early spring from the upper nodes, few [2 to 3] flowered inflorescence carrying large showy flowers.

Synonyms Callista linawiana (Rchb.f.) Kuntze 1891; Dendrobium alboviride Hayata 1920; Dendrobium purpureum (Raf.) M.R.Almeida 2009; Ormostema purpurea Raf. 1838

Dendrobium linawianum Rchb.f. 1861 SECTION Dendrobium

Take a look at the bolded text in the two excerpts above. As many teachers in the audience can relate, grammatical errors or typos in a text suspected of being, ahem, plagiarized, that perfectly match grammatical errors or typos in an original document is practically smoking gun proof of copying.

I’ve got nothing against folks trying to earn money on the web, but I am troubled by what is, essentially, plagiarism, but I’m really disturbed by the lack of attribution to IOSPE.

So you can see why this kind of stuff, without attribution, is really bad for spreading good, quality information on orchids (or anything else). Someone, an original writer, posts something incorrect about growing orchids someplace. The posting gets linked by someone else, and then gets quoted by someone else, and then a cut-and-paste operator grabs it, and before you know it, this wrong info has spread all over the web, and people start believing it. And that’s another reason why there’s so much bad info about orchids on the web.

One of our tasks here at Orchid Insanity is to give orchid growers real info about orchids. Our hope is that you, as an orchid grower, will continue to spread the good word about growing these fascinating plants, and push back against the bad information and mis-information out there. It’s a big job.

TL;DR: Incorrect info about an orchid topic on the web gets propagated by people who don’t know (or don’t care) about the veracity of the info. More and more people read this bad info, and believe it. We’re offering good info here to push back against the bad, and hope you’ll absorb the good stuff and pass it along.

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How to Avoid the New Orchid Grower’s Vicious Cycle of Orchid Failure

Many new orchid growers fail, not because they don’t have the proper growing media, or the right pots, or the best water.  These new growers fail because they don’t have the proper expectations about growing orchids.  They start with WRONG expectations and assumptions, derived from their experience growing garden plants (usually very fast growers as compared to orchids) or they’ve gotten information about orchids that doesn’t apply to their level of growing skill, or they assume that “plants are plants” and they all need the same kind of care.  These wrong expectations and assumptions lead to bad choices that then lead to stressed/dead orchids.

An example: newbie growers eagerly look for new shoots, new leaves, new roots, and new flowers.  And they want to see these things FAST.  What many new growers don’t understand is that all of these things take much more time with orchids than garden plants or house plants (and may be seasonal).  

So the excited new grower gets a new orchid but doesn’t see what s/he expects after just a few days or a couple of weeks, and then does something really unfortunate, like switches over to a different cultural style, or repots in some sure-fire magic mix, or dumps in some magical fertilizer additive.  But the poor plant starts showing stress, and our new grower gets more worried.  She scours the web for advice, and looks for the cause of her orchid troubles.  Then she tries a bunch of different things in rapid succession, or even worse, all at once.

Now her orchid is thinking, “Wait!  What is going one here?  First this new mix, now this seaweed stuff?  And now an antifungal powder?  But what about the good mycorrhizae fungi on my roots that scavenge nutrients for me?  What’s happening?  I must be in an orchid newbie’s house!  Nooooo!  Why me? Why couldn’t it have been that clone with the big blooms and sassy attitude next to me at the nursery? Get me outta here! This is too much.  It’s all happening too fast!  I can’t take it anymore!  HELP!”

Unfortunately, everything our new grower has done to help her orchid has only made things worse, and both she and her orchid are frustrated. So our newbie grower tries again with some more orchids.  But because she still has the wrong expectations and the wrong ideas, she just repeats the vicious cycle with new variations, and ends up with the same frustrating results.  

A few more turns of this cycle, and the more self-aware growers start to realize, “Hey, maybe it’s not you (orchids/vendors/universe).  Maybe It’s me.  Maybe I’m the problem.”  Other new growers, not so much.  They blame the vendor for selling them sick plants, they blame the media, they blame the fertilizer, they blame the air, wind, and sun. For these blame-everyone folks, my suggestion is: try a rock garden.

But if you’re one of these new growers who has gone around the orchid newbie’s wheel of misfortune a few times and desperately want to stop the cycle of orchid killing, how do you break out?  It’s easy: drop your old expectations and assumptions about orchids.  Don’t assume you know anything.  Then learn what orchids need, and give it to them. (Also, there are orchid support groups available — they’re called orchid societies, and there’s probably one near you eager to have you join, especially if you’re under the age of 40. Or even 50. OK, even under 60 is welcome. OK, any age.)

Here are three simple steps to breaking out of the vicious cycle:

1) Don’t repot new orchids right away.  They were doing fine in the pots and media you got them in, and they’ll be fine for another few months.

2) Give your orchids high humidity conditions.  This will solve the majority of your growing problems.  Almost no orchids will do well in 10% relative humidity (i.e., indoor conditions during the winter in most homes).  If you can provide some kind of simple transparent enclosure, you will be well on your way to long-term orchid growing success.

3) Water your orchids with high-quality (i.e., low mineral content) water, such as distilled water, rain water, or reverse osmosis-purified water.  You don’t need to worry about ANY fertilizer for a few months.  (Actually, if your very first impulse is to feed, you’ll know you have the wrong mentality for growing orchids.)

Tap water might be just fine in your area (e.g., Hawaii), or it might not (e.g., Phoenix, AZ). Don’t assume that because other plants grow well for you with your tap water, that orchids will necessarily do the same. They might, or they might not. Orchids available to new growers are almost always tropical rainforest plants, and rainforest water is very, very pure.

So when starting out with a small collection, use distilled water (a gallon or two will be plenty for a handful of orchids for awhile, and yes, you can re-use the runoff at least one time). When your collection reaches ten plants or more, consider getting an inexpensive reverse osmosis filter (around $60 on Amazon).

Then, learn growing more from reliable sources.  When you’re starting out, it’s hard to discern the good from the bad, but this website (www.orchidinsanity.com) is a good place to start.

And finally, learn from the best teachers of orchids, the plants themselves.

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Orchid Thieves

(The following post was written in 2009, on my previous but now-defunct blog, slipperorchidblog.com. For those who don’t know about Phrag. kovachii, it had been discovered not too long before 2009 and probably was one of the biggest orchid finds in the previous 100 years.)

We’re all passionate about orchids.  If you’re reading this, you really, really like orchids.  Some people like them so much, though, that they will steal them when they can.

No, I’m not talking about stealing from the jungle.

I’m talking about people who actually will steal orchids outright.  Here are a few stories:

1) One grower I know had to step away to take a call while a customer remained unattended in the greenhouse.  When the grower came back, what did he see, but the customer with toothpick in hand swiping pollen from a prized plant!  The customer/thief was sent packing quite quickly.

2) Another story from a very reliable source: an orchid judge/official was left alone in a greenhouse full of expensive stud plants.  The judge decided to help himself/herself to a division of an excellent specimen.  And by division, I don’t mean something already divided and potted up.  This person was caught pulling the stud plant out of pot, and trying to break off a piece of it!  Somehow, the “Oh,-I-forgot-that-I’m-not-supposed-to-do-that” excuse that works so well with tax-deadbeat politicians doesn’t work so well in the real world or orchids.  Well, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, since orchid judging is so political.

3) I once visited the greenhouse of a commercial grower, and we got to talking about Phrag. kovachii.  In my orchid envy, I asked if he had any.

The owner answered, tersely, “Yes.”

“Oh, I’d love to see them.  Can you show them to me?” I asked, politely.

“No.”

I was puzzled.  Growers are usually excited to show off the new stuff.  “Why not?” I asked.  “Were they obtained illegally?”

“No, they are all legal.  But I can’t show them to you because of what happened previously when I did show them to someone.  As the customer was leaving, I had to ask him to please remove and return the kovachii plants that were sticking out of his pocket.  So I’m not showing the kovachii’s to anyone anymore.”

Me: “Wow.  OK.  I understand.”

4) I was having an open house at my nursery, and a bunch of people came over. While I was talking with a small crowd, I noticed the wife of a very prominent orchid person simply pick up a lovely Paph in full bloom, and walk out the door. She came back into the greenhouse a few minutes later (without the Paph), and rejoined her husband. Because the husband of the woman is very prominent in the orchid world (and I mean internationally known), I didn’t want to make a scene. He ended up buying some other orchids (of a completely different type). I’m not sure if he was aware of what his wife had done but I would imagine that with his level of orchid expertise, he would’ve spotted the purloned Paph as soon as he saw it, probably on the way home. Well, he had done me a very kind turn in the past, and I didn’t want to cause a scene that would have embarrassed him or anyone else, so I just stayed quiet about it.

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Should you repot your new orchid right away?

Many people advise repotting orchids you’ve gotten right away.  These growers fall into two camps:

1) Experienced growers who actually know what they’re talking about, but don’t realize they have plenty of newbies in their audience

2) People who don’t know what they’re talking about

Obviously, ignore (2) whenever possible.  For a few tips on how to detect these well-meaning but dangerous-to-your-orchids people, see this post: Questions To Ask About Any Orchid Advice You’re Given [coming soon].

Now when an experienced grower gives you advice, they’re telling you what works for them, because they already know how orchids fare in their own growing conditions AND (this next part is very important) they know what to expect.

When an experienced grower repots their plants immediately, they’re doing it because they have a media/growing mix they prefer BECAUSE they understand how their media performs with water retention and their watering frequency.  Just as importantly, they also know how long it will take for newly-acquired plants to respond (e.g., grow new roots) and hence have the proper expectations.  These experienced guys tell you what they know works for them, but they don’t always keep in mind that new growers lack the experience to place this advice in the proper context.

New orchid growers have usually grown other houseplants, and generally repotting a houseplant soon after you get it is the right move.  What these new orchid growers don’t know is how slow orchids root and grow relative to houseplants.  They (and even some experienced growers) also don’t know that orchids make roots adapted to the media they’re growing in.  Switching from, say, a coconut husk medium over to sphagnum moss may be exactly the right thing to do for long-term health of a plant, but the newbie grower is usually expecting something to happen fast, like in a few days.  After all, this is what happens with other house and garden plants, right?   Unfortunately, for orchids: wrong.  New roots might take weeks, or even several months to start to grow.  It depends on the type of plant, the media, the humidity level, etc.  

If you’re just getting into orchids, DO NOT REPOT your plants right away.  You want to give your plants time to adjust to their new home — the light, the temperature, the humidity (hopefully high), the water quality, and watering frequency.  Re-potting right away compounds the stress faced by your plants after they’ve arrived.  In fact, re-potting into a new, DIFFERENT media than your plant was growing in can be quite stressful for some orchids.  If the media is good stuff, and the growing conditions are good, the plant will be just fine in the long run (do expect a few dropped leaves).  If you’re new to orchids, the conditions you’re providing newly-arrived plants may not be great yet; that’s to be expected because, after all, you’re still learning.  But you can lighten the load on your new plants by not repotting for six months or even longer.  A healthy plant will NOT be harmed by not repotting.  (If the plant is not healthy, repotting is one of the best things to do, but hopefully as a new grower you’re not trying to recover stressed orchids; that’s something you do when you’re an advanced grower.)

Not repotting your new orchid right away will give you a few months to see how it does in your growing conditions, and hopefully give you time to get more educated about the types of media out there, and how to create great growing conditions for your orchids.  And most importantly, it gives you the time to acquire the proper expectations for orchids.  They’re NOT garden/vegetable/typical house plants, and they do things on their own time scale.  Repotting into new potting media, and expecting a fast and obvious response from the plant, is absolutely the wrong expectation to have and will lead to frustration for the grower and stress for the plant…or even worse if the grower falls into the orchid newbie vicious cycle of errors.  

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Why so much orchid growing info on the web is unreliable, bad, or wrong

Why is so much orchid info online bad, wrong, or low quality?

Because many people simply don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to orchids (and much else).  Do you remember those kids in school who just had to blare out whatever they thought on any subject?  They always had an opinion or half-baked thought.  They may genuinely have believed they were being helpful, but mostly they lacked a bit of self-awareness.  You may even have someone like that in your family or workplace who simply MUST give you advice (often bad) and opinions (often silly) on every situation in your life.

Here’s my hypothesis: a huge amount of stuff posted as comments on the web comes from people like this.  They don’t know what they’re talking about, but they feel a need to tell you anyways.

A treasure trove garbage dump of bad orchid advice is the answers given to questions asked on our Amazon listing for Dendrobium kingianum, our top-selling orchid.  Any customer can ask a question, and anyone can chime in with an answer. I recently perused what people asked about this orchid we offer, and the “helpful” answers provided by self-declared experts. There’s so much mis-information, ignorance masquerading as deep knowledge, and even confessions of “I don’t know” by people who are trying to answer the question (well, if you don’t know, why bother uploading an answer?).

The following response takes the cake:

Q: How do you grow this plant?

You’ll want to keep the temperature above 55, but below 85 with the highest humidity. [WRONG, WRONG, and HALF-WRONG. You want to let this plant get down into the 40s F (or even 30s F) during winter so that it will set the flower buds for blooming in spring. This plant can easily handle temps into 100+ F; they certainly do at my nursery and in their native Australia. High humidity is good, but not critical for this species.]

Bright light, but out of direct sunlight is best–even a strong halogen bulb will burn the leaves. [OK, not completely off-base re direct sun, but not so true re halogen bulb . You want to get a recalcitrant kingianum to bloom?  Give it DIRECT SUN even if the leaves burn.  This but of advice was given to me by an expert grower in Australia, where this species comes from]

Repot it as soon as it comes in, [SUPER WRONG!] mine had a solid ball of sphagnum in the roots which will rot and cause damage to your roots. [SUPER DUPER WRONG- sphagnum moss is the BEST medium for this kind of orchid! Wow.]

Don’t repot in a huge container, orchids like to wrap their roots in a ball, so choose a pot only slightly larger to promote growth. [BINGO, FINALLY, A REASONABLY CORRECT ANSWER!]

Repot once every two years, you’ll notice the bark chips start to break down–thats when to repot. [NOT REALLY NEEDED FOR THIS SPECIES] Many people avoid terracotta because the roots will bind to the edge, but I like that it helps wick away excess water in the bottom of the pot. [HEY, NOT BAD…] Edging with a butter knife will get the roots to come back out with little damage.

Water it with about 1/4 cup of water around once per week. [UNBELIEVABLY WRONG! JUST USE A HOSE AND DON’T BE SHY WITH WATER. I MEAN, DOES ANYONE GO AROUND POURING A SMALL QUARTER CUP OF WATER ON ORCHIDS IN THE JUNGLE? WHEN IT RAINS, IT POURS!]

Keep it in well draining soil (I use mostly bark chips, but you’ll need to figure out what is best for your climate) Starting in November, you’ll want to water it half as often until it grows a flower spike. [HALF WRONG.  LET IT DRY OUT COMPLETELY!]  If May comes around and still no flowers [WRONG, THAT’S TOO LONG TO WAIT], go back to usual watering and try again next year with a little less watering. [DANG, WE INCLUDE INSTRUCTIONS THAT TELL YOU NO WATER STARTING NOVEMBER 1!]

If you start using fertilizer, make it half as strong as suggested on the bottle for the first couple uses, going straight to full strength fertilizer can burn the roots. [A POSSIBLY ACCEPTABLE ANSWER DEPENDING ON TYPE OF FERTILIZER USED]

This person meant well, but unfortunately, most of what he said was flat-out wrong! Now when most comments on the internet are posted by people like this, clogging up the web with wrong info, it makes it hard for the accurate stuff to get through. And that’s why there’s so much bad info about orchids online.

If you want reliable info on growing orchids, www.orchidinsanity.com (i.e., the present website) is pretty good, if I do say so myself.

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Why you should never buy orchid seeds online

Most people know the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack and his widowed mother live a hardscrabble life on a farm. They need seed to plant for next season’s harvest, and since they have no money, the mother tells Jack to sell their only cow for seeds to plant. On the way to market, a mysterious gentleman talks Jack into trading his cow for a few “magic” seeds. When the boy comes home early and his mother finds out what Jack has done, she berates him for his foolishness. Of course the magic seeds grow into a massive beanstalk that Jack climbs into the clouds, where he has many adventures and ends up with riches beyond belief. 

This will NOT happen if you buy orchid seeds. Unlike most seeds you know (e.g., corn, tomato, peppers, basil, apple, etc.), orchid seeds look like specks of dust; they are that fine. (There are a few exceptions where the seeds look more “normal”, but they’re very uncommon.) When orchid seeds disperse and land someplace to germinate, they form a symbiotic relationship with a type of fungi called mycorrhizae. These fungi supply nourishment to the germinating seed, as orchid seeds do not carry stored nutrients, which is why they’re so small.

In the 1920s, scientists figured out that orchid seeds can be sown directly on sterile nutrient media (a jello-like substance with sugar and other nutrients for the seed to absorb), and germination could occur aseptically. After the orchid hunters of the Victorian era, this was the next quantum leap in orchids, and over the past 100 years, orchid researchers have developed methods and many different types of media for growing orchids in laboratories. In fact, all of the orchids you see in big box stores started off in a laboratory somewhere.

The problem for buyers of online orchid seeds is they don’t know what they don’t know. A casual but dedicated orchid grower sees an ad for orchid seed for a few bucks, and thinks they can just sprinkle the seed onto some dirt, and they’ll get some nice plants going and maybe see some blooms in a year or two. It’s not going to happen.

Here’s what the casual grower doesn’t know: Orchid seeds for commercial growth (and made by serious hobbyists doing their own breeding) are all sown in laboratory conditions. Some businesses have the expertise to do this (we have our own lab here at Orchid Insanity), and a dedicated hobbyist can learn how to do it as well. While it’s not rocket science, there is a steep initial learning curve. 

On top of the expense, effort, and expertise needed to set up an orchid laboratory, you also need a lot of patience. It takes around three to seven years to go from a sown seed in a sterile flask to a blooming size plant.

So if you’ve bought some orchid seeds online, throw ’em out. They’re likely fake (i.e., not real orchid seeds but seeds from some other plant), and won’t do a thing for you. I’m sure clever scammers send non-orchid seeds that might germinate fast enough for you to leave a positive review on Amazon or eBay, but most certainly won’t bloom with an orchid flower, and by the time this imposter plant does bloom, you’ll be well past the 90-day window for demanding a refund or leaving a negative feedback. (Or, like someone we tried to talk out of getting online orchid seeds, you’ll actually believe the imposter plant is a real orchid.) As far as scams go, it seems to sucker plenty of people, as these listings never get pulled from Amazon or eBay, probably for the following reasons:

  1. The loss to any one individual buyer is not worth that buyer’s time to pursue. By the time they realize a plant that has grown and bloomed is NOT an orchid (if they ever do realize this), it’s too late to file a complaint with Amazon/eBay/etc.
  2. Most of these fake orchid seeds that do get sown by eager buyers won’t germinate at all, and the buyers will blame themselves for using the wrong kind of dirt, and end up forgetting about it.
  3. Even if buyers were to send lots of complaints in to Amazon/eBay, who on their staff is botanically competent enough to evaluate the truth of the buyers’ claims? They’ve simply got much bigger fish to fry with more serious scams out there, and fixing algorithms that shut down completely legit listings (it’s happened several times to us).
  4. These fake orchid seed listings continue to get sales, as there’s a sucker born every minute new, excited folks enter the orchid hobby all the time and some of them think that they’ll save money by growing these lovely beauties themselves from seed, the way they did with tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, etc. So to the Amazon/eBay algorithms, these listings are good/valid listings, else why would buyers keep buying from them?

The end result is that these fake orchid seed sellers (many located in China) continue to make money as they’ve staked out a little niche where it’s hard for them to get caught.

But what about early orchid breeders back in the 1800s before all this orchid lab stuff got going? Orchid lovers bred orchids back in the 1800s, and without specialized orchid laboratories, how did they sow the seeds? Well, they did it the natural way. They let the orchid seed capsules break open naturally, and let the fine-as-dust seed scatter right on top of the media containing the mother plant. This method worked to a fair degree in those days because those mother plants had come from the jungle itself, and hence were already covered with the proper mycorrhizae to support the orchid seeds. The symbiosis between orchid seeds and mycorrhizae is somewhat specific to the species of plant and fungi, and this is the reason it’s hard to replicate today what the Victorian-era orchid breeders did a century ago. An orchid you get nowadays started life in a sterile laboratory flask, and hence does not carry any of the specific mycorrhizae needed for seed germination. Other species of mycorrhizae might work, but there are a lot of mycorrhizae types out there, and getting a functioning symbiotic match is unlikely (but not impossible).