This is just going to be really quick because I’m posting from my iPhone, but I have to share my excitement. I got to visit an orchid farm yesterday! I went to Santa Barbara Orchid Estate, and it was absolute heaven. So overwhelming…orchids everywhere.
I’ll do a proper post when I return home but I wanted to share a couple pics now.
Happy Friday the 13th!
If you follow my blog you may have noticed I haven’t posted in a couple weeks. I’ve been pretty busy and am doing a little traveling, so I haven’t had tons of time to post. I just got back in town yesterday (went to my 15 year—YIKES—high school reunion in St. Louis, which was a lot of fun) and am leaving again this afternoon for a trip to southern Cali (where I might visit an orchid farm or two!).
Starting next week I should be back in the blogging business, and I have plenty to write about regarding my own orchids. For now, I leave you with this crappy iPhone pic of one of my big white Phals whose side shoot just bloomed yesterday! The blooms are quite a bit smaller than the first blooms off this spike, but that’s normal. They are still very lovely, and when I return from Cali I imagine at least a couple more of those buds will have opened. 🙂
One of my Zygopetalums has bloomed!!! It’s the NOID one that I bought at Trader Joe’s in June 2010, and I am so in love with it (click image to see larger version):
Apologies for skipping my Orchid of the Week post last Friday! I think I just wasn’t in the mood for some reason. Every now and then it just feels like too much effort to blog. But no worries, because Orchid of the Week is back today with Sedirea japonica, a beautiful little plant native to (duh) Japan.
I went to Lowe’s on an errand for my boyfriend this weekend and when I saw that they had received a new shipment of Better-Gro orchids, it was pretty much inevitable that I would walk out of the store with at least one.
I ended up selecting a Rhynchostylis Gigantea ‘Peach’ that looked pretty healthy from what I could see through the packaging.
As I’ve discovered with my other Better-Gro purchases, the potting medium was pretty gross. So I repotted the plant with fresh sphagnum moss when I brought it home and trimmed away a few rotten roots. I’ve never grown a Rhynchostylis before, so this is a first for my orchid collection. Let’s hope that I can get this baby to bloom!
Whoops! I skipped my Orchid of the Week post yesterday, so here it is: the Hexalectris spicata. I chose this little orchid because I have a friend visiting from North Carolina this weekend; the plant is native to that state, among others. Hexalectris (which kinda sounds like a superhero, no?) is part of the Epidendroidae subfamily:
