Saturday, January 19, 2019

My Year of Orchids: “Resting” or not resting or maybe just a little resting...

The experts say certain orchids need a winter rest. Rest is supposed to equal no water and no fertilizer. Or maybe a little bit of water and no fertilizer or....maybe just a tiny bit of fertilizer?

There are no tried and true rules for the orchids it seems. Common sense would suggest that we look carefully and act accordingly. Does the orchid look thirsty? When you water it does it look a little happier? Do you even know if this is one of the mandatory “rest” orchids?

The orchids in my garden seem to have sprung into life about the time the days got cool and some of the nights bordered on cold (about 50F). About the same time, I started using some dilute commercial fertilizer and orchids that had been quiescent all summer suddenly started forming root systems, new shoots, even flowering spikes. So. Where does “rest” come in?

To confuse matters a little more, cool days have been interspersed with sunny days in the mid to upper 70s. Perfect growing weather I’d think. Not necessarily a good time to nap. So. Keep watering and add some fertilizer? If it ain’t broke.....

As the light in my garden changes so do the growing conditions. This is almost a daily occurrence and it always catches me by surprise. I’ve watched the orchids carefully for cues and very few of them have had an adverse reaction to watering with some fertilizer. Those I backed off of. But even those, for example the large leafy Maxillaria arachnitifolia, had an excellent response to being soaked for a minute in my smelly home-brewed compost tea. Maybe it was the leaves that were complaining about being sprayed with commercial fertilizer.

Bulbophyllum (both of the species I have) has gone wild for the “growing season” treatment, pushing out new root and shoot. systems. And “cool growing” species like Neofinetia falcata, a native of temperate Japan, has flowered in addition to doubling in size.

Confounding the given wisdom is also the fact that most instructions out there are for orchids grown in pots or baskets indoors. All of mine are outside and most of them are just stuck in trees, not even growing in baskets. Certainly in nature, even in the dry season, there are occasional rains, certainly morning dew, and along with precipitation a steady accumulation of nutrients- dust, falling leaves, dead bugs. So why should we stop fertilizing?

A final thought for now. What role do hybrids play? Even if there were consistency within a particular orchid genus, which there’s not, wouldn’t each hybrid, especially intergeneric hybrids, have its own set of requirements for “rest period?”

I’ve got to think about this a lot more. And I need to watch the orchids. See how they grow, how they change color, whether they retreat, etc. My fascination with these mysterious yet surprisinginly straightforward plants continues to grow.

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