orchids | Brooklyn Orchids

Sign Up for a Free Orchid Care Tips Newsletter!

June 18, 2013 1 Comment

This post contains affiliate links.

There are limitless places on the interwebz where you can seek out information on how to care for orchids. Obviously if you’re reading this you’ve found one such destination, but reading multiple sources will help give you a deeper understanding of what to do with your favorite houseplants. I never rely on just one website when I’m researching what to do with my orchids. So I’d like to recommend another source for getting great, detailed tips and advice on orchid care: sign up for the free Orchids Made Easy newsletter! Ryan “The Orchid Guy” Levesque will bring tons of helpful orchid information straight to your inbox and it won’t cost you a dime.

Just some of the topics that Ryan’s newsletters covers are as follows:

How to get your orchid to rebloom
What to do do immediately after blooms drop
How to identify your orchids so that you can give them the proper care
The five most important things to do when you bring an orchid home
How to tell if you’re overwatering or underwatering your orchid
When and how often to fertilize your orchid
How to tell when you should repot your orchid
What yellow leaves mean and what to do about them
Find out what’s eating or damaging your plant and how to get rid of it

Click here to sign up for Ryan’s newsletter…and enjoy!

My Orchid Garden

My Oncidium Pacific Sunrise ‘Hakalau’ Has Bloomed!

June 15, 2013 3 Comments

One day after my birthday, my Oncidium Pacific Sunrise ‘Hakalau’ really opened up! It’s actually not at all the orchid that I thought it was…but it’s still very lovely. This is what happens when you buy an orchid that’s not in bloom and then you don’t Google the orchid’s name. You think the flowers are gonna look like this:

Fragrant Oncidium — Not in fact the Oncidium Pacific Sunrise!

And then the buds start to form and they look much smaller and darker than you’d expect:

My Orchid Garden

Quick Spike & Bud Update

June 11, 2013 4 Comments

In my latest update on what’s going on with my orchids, I mentioned that one of the Phals I’m growing at my fiancé’s office is in spike. I had accidentally deleted the photo of it from my phone, so I took another pic yesterday—and it’s growing like a weed! It’s funny how much faster these things seem to grow when you don’t see them day in and day out.

My Orchid Garden, Orchid Care

Brooklyn Orchids Featured on Orchids Made Easy

May 28, 2013 5 Comments

The wonderful Ryan and Laura over at Orchids Made Easy asked me for an interview (awww, shucks) about how I got into orchids and my blog that you’re reading right now. Of course I agreed to the interview! Read the interview here to find out more about my foray into the world of orchids and how I got started blogging about them. I talk about my favorite orchid, and offer up what in my humble opinion are a couple of the best tips for orchid growing.

I’d like to say a big thank you to Ryan and Laura for featuring me and my blog! It’s so great to know that people are actually visiting my site and learning from it in the process. Anything to help out our fellow orchid lovers. 🙂

Oh — and while I’m at it: happy summer to everyone! Hope you all got to enjoy the long weekend and eat some tasty grilled foodstuffs…I know I sure did.

How-To, Orchid Beginner Tips

Keikis: What They Are and What to Do with Them

May 23, 2013 16 Comments

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).

My Orchid Garden

Orchids in Jamaica, An Oncidium in Spike, and Other Developments

May 17, 2013 7 Comments

Well, look at that…it’s been about two months since I last updated my blog. Sorry about that, folks! I’ve been hard at work on another project that I will hopefully be able to share with you soon. During this unplanned blog hiatus, [BIG ANNOUCEMENT!] I got engaged, then went to Jamaica for what had become an engagement celebration vacation with my ~~boyfriend~~ fiancé. We stayed at The Jewel Dunn’s River in Ocho Rios, an all-inclusive resort, and we had a really amazing time. On our second day there I noticed a beautiful orchid in bloom attached to the trunk of a palm tree on the resort grounds, and once I saw that one I started seeing them everywhere!