Tag: bad orchid advice

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!

(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.