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:
So, I am a gigantic klutz. It’s like my body has no sense of where it is in relation to other objects. I am constantly running into things, even in my own apartment: stubbing my toes, slamming my shins into the coffee table, banging my elbows into the bathroom walls. I’ve been known to walk into walls. Recently I chipped a tooth slightly by banging it with a glass when I went to take a drink of water. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that last night when I went into my Orchid Room to get something off of my vanity table, my hand hit the top of the orchid spike that I’m experimenting on with Keiki Grow Paste. Yeah…the one that I updated you on yesterday. Apparently those new growths are pretty delicate, because I knocked part of the growth clear off. DAMMIT!!
I wasn’t really sure what to do, so I slathered some more KGP on the broken end in the hope that it will just sort of regenerate…like when a lizard’s tail is cut off and it grows a new one.
I have no idea what will happen to the growth now. It’s too bad, because that’s the one that was farthest along in its development. So…we’ll see.
Klutziness FTL!
A few weeks ago I posted about my first experiment with trying to propagate my Phals using Keiki Grow Paste. As I mentioned, I originally applied the paste to two of my out-of-blooms Phals; the first application was on March 17 and then I applied the paste a second time on March 30. The two nodes on the mini Phal are not showing any growth, but three of the four nodes on my big white Phal are showing definite growth! Check out pics of the three developing nodes, from the top of the spike to the bottom:
The growth appears to be more than just a side shoot, but time will tell. It’s fun to watch these grow—hopefully they will turn into actual keikis that I can eventually detach and pot on their own!
Also, I just now applied Keiki Grow Paste to three nodes of a Phal’s spike that just finished blooming (this cute orchid from Trader Joe’s). Stay tuned for updates on that one as well.
My parents were in town from St. Louis this past weekend and early this week. My mom is a fan of orchids, so I thought it would be a fun activity for us to go to the Orchid Show at NYBG. So on Tuesday morning we met at my parents’ hotel in Brooklyn Heights and my mom and I subwayed it to Grand Central, then took the Metro North train up to the Botanical Garden. It was only a 20 minute ride from Grand Central—and so much cheaper than renting a Zipcar and faster than taking the subway the whole way!
Most of the flowers on display were the same as my first time around, but there were a few new ones here and there. This show just never gets old!
So, here they are: my favorite photos from my second visit to The Orchid Show….