It just occurred to me that 2019 marked my 10th year of orchid growing! This means that I’ve officially been into the hobby for a quarter of my life. That’s kind of mind blowing!
Okay, so every website on the planet is doing these “top X of the year” posts…I did it on my personal blog so I’m doing it here too. 🙂 But first, I wanna share a couple pics of my red NOID Phal keiki that started blooming yesterday! This one snuck in just before the end of the year:
Finally…my NOID Phal keikiis in full bloom! This beautiful baby has five blooms, one of which has turned its back in a Blair Witch sort of way—probably because I moved the orchid while the buds were still developing. It’s ok, though, the plant is still gorgeous!
Say you have a lovely Phalaenopsis orchid and one day you notice that there’s something growing off of its spike, something that doesn’t look like a flower bud. Maybe it looks like a new leaf or two (like in the photo to the right)…and after awhile what looks like a root starts to appear. What is this growth? Is it normal, and what should you do with it?
I get a lot of questions like these from readers, so it’s well past time to dedicate a blog post to the topic. The growth I described above is a baby orchid or plantlet, known to orchid lovers as a “keiki” (the Hawaiian term for “the little one”). Keikis are clones of the “mother” plant and can either be left attached to the mother or removed and potted individually once they have grown large enough. Keikis can grow off of the spike or stem of the mother, or they can begun to sprout from the plant base, in which case they are referred to as basal keikis (I currently have two of these developing on one Phal).
Exciting things are afoot here at Brooklyn Orchids. First and foremost, I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally switched over to my own my boyfriend’s website host, which will allow me a lot more flexibility in customizing my site. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time, and with the help of my wonderful boyfriend (thankyouthankyouthankyou my dear!!), the time is now.
What does this mean for you as a reader? So far, not much, but you can expect to start seeing some changes here and there. I’m not very well versed in web tech stuff, so it’s going to take me awhile to figure how to do what I want to do around here. In the meantime, if you see anything weird going on with my blog, please don’t hesitate to comment and let me know!
The next announcement I have is that the Brooklyn Orchids 2013 Calendar is now available in my Zazzle store! The calendar is $23.00 and includes twelve months of my original orchid photography, mostly from my visit to the Orchid Show this past spring. It makes a great holiday gift for the orchid fiend in your life (and a great gift for yourself, of course!). I’ve also added a bunch of great new products to my store, including a variety of orchid iPhone cases, iPad cases, Kindle cases, and aluminum water bottles. I’m going to be adding even more products to the store soon. If you have any requests for a specific orchid photo of mine on a particular product, please let me know!
I have some new developments to write about since my last post about the nice surprise I woke up to almost a month ago. Since then, all of the buds on that Oncidium have opened up, and the plant has a lovely spray of lightly fragranced blooms: