New Home + Orchid Update

New Home, Who Dis?

Yeah, I basically just post here a few times a year now. Eventually I’d like to get back to posting more regularly, but I’ve been much more focused on my Adventures of Herman blog and Instagram. And over the past few months we were busy with getting our new home move-in ready. We moved in at the end of January (hooray!!) and are still getting settled in.

We will be building a greenhouse in our back yard, like I mentioned, but that isn’t going to happen until June. So I needed a temporary indoor setup for my orchids once we moved. First I put them in my office, on shelves by the eastern-facing windows:

Pardon the move-in mess

My husband’s office is directly above mine, and has two eastern-facing windows plus two skylights that we installed. His room gets more light than mine, so we decided to move my orchids up there until we build our greenhouse. So I thought I’d share my temporary orchid setup…which may change between now and June as I gauge how the orchids are liking it.

I have a bunch of Phalaenopsis and African violets on this set of black plastic shelves:

Don’t mind the mess, we’re still in the process of setting our home up.

My husband just installed shelves in the window nooks of his office, so I put a bunch of my Phalaenopsis orchids on one:

The shelf gets more light than what’s pictured here. Possibly too much light for Phals.

And I placed some other orchid varieties in the other window:

Before I moved my plants to the current setup, I noticed that a few of my Phals’ leaves were starting to turn a little reddish-purple around the edges, which means they were getting too much light. So I’m going to keep an eye on that and move the plants around as necessary. It’s going to be a bit of a process trying to find the right light for them…and then they’re all going to move again once the greenhouse is ready. Sorry, plants! But a greenhouse should be soooo much better!

Greenhouse Planning

Speaking of our greenhouse, the last time I posted about our new place I wasn’t sure what the plan was. We had initially thought about building a greenhouse on our roof terrace—or potentially even enclosing most of it—but we’ve shifted gears and decided to put a cedar lean-to greenhouse in the back yard. My husband came up with a really cool plan for the yard and I think it will be amazing. And we’ve actually ordered a greenhouse kit. I’m very excited!

We’re going to build the greenhouse along part of the brick wall in our back yard:

We’ll have to remove some of the creeping vines growing along the brick wall, but it’s for a good cause.

Possible Dendrobium Blooms To Come

In the meantime, I’ll keep plugging away at trying to keep my orchids alive. I might actually have a spike developing on a NOID Dendrobium that I’ve had for YEARS. I believe I bought it at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden shop. The plant was in bloom when I bought it, but it hasn’t bloomed for me since. See that green growth poking up right in the middle of the photo? I think it could be a bud sheath.

I’m not 100% positive that’s what the growth is, but it looks similar to the bud sheath I’ve seen develop on my Encyclia cochleata. So it looks promising! And if this Dendrobium really is going to bloom, it’s a good sign that my orchids are already liking our new home. They haven’t been all that happy for the past few years because our apartments haven’t had good lighting for them and I never bothered to set up artificial lighting.

So that’s what’s going on around here! I know I’ve been super MIA, but that should change as we start building our greenhouse and hopefully getting some blooms on my orchids.

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