Fungus Threatens Your Young Orchids - Lesson Learned

Most beginners water their orchids in a wrong manner and with young orchids this can be very fatal. If you are new and don’t water them in the manner I showed you in one of my previous posts it is very likely that there will be an excess of water left in the pot. Apart from root damage this can lead to fungus growth on the growing medium. While most plants can easily live together with a small fungus many orchid species with tender roots and especially young plants can’t handle it.

Fungus can be easily identified if you take a very close look at your growing medium. Look out for small flake like structures, white or black dots or stuff that looks similiar to a spider web.

If this happened to your orchid, try to remove the fungus with some fungicide or it will most likely die. But wether you can save it or not, you learned a very valuable lesson: Watering is a crucial part in raising young orchids! Doing it wrong comes with many dangers.

Now that the post is written it sounds like a trivial matter but I stopped counting how often it happened to me until I learned the super cool watering technique I talked about in my previous post about watering young orchids.

Young Orchids For Mother’s Day

Hey folks, just a quick reminder: Don’t forget that in about two weeks time Mother’s Day is coming up! Maybe one or two new young orchids are the perfect gift for her ( or one for her and one for you if you’re a mom yourself )? If your mom has a green thumb she will appreciate a new addition to her collection ! You can never have enough orchids, right?

5 Simple Steps For Watering Young Orchids

Okay, first of all, a friend pointed out that aparently my writing style is not what is “common sense” in the blogging world. Most people seem to want short and pregnant chunks of information instead of reading someone’s brabbeling and pulling out the pieces of information. Well, if viewed from the perspective of my visitors it is probably right - I tend to talk alot. So I will try a different writing style with short pieces of easily consumable pieces of advices for you! Okay, on with 5 Simple Steps For Watering Young Orchids!

1. First of all, check the moisture of the growing medium - is watering necessary?
2. Prepare a container with water
3. Then, carefully lift the young orchid together with the growing medium out of its pot.
4. Holding the orchid over the sink, pour on water until the growing medium is nicely soaked - orchids need lots of water!
5. The trick is to let the overage of water run into the sink.

If you follow these simple steps it is almost sure that your young orchids delicate roots don’t rot because all the water is held by the growing medium and can easily be consumed by the plant. Most people just pour on water while the orchid is still in the pot - that way the overage of water stays and can lead to root damage.

Photo by POSITiv.

Neat Trick: Keep A Diary On Your Young Orchids

Here’s a quicky for the artistic orchid lovers!

A while after I started out raising young orchids developed into a hobby and a burning passion of mine. This is when I started to keep a journal on my flowers. I started to write down how I watered them, which growing mediums I used, stuff I learned about the different species I learned, etc. Sometimes I add pictures I take or do some rough sketches.

Today those journals are very benefitial to me. First, they let me go back in time and re-read which mistakes I made. Through the writing I was forced to focus on what I did exactly. It helped my stay consistent with watering, fertilizing, potting etc.

Thanks to that I can now put some blog posts on the web and hopefully keep fellow orchid lovers like you from doing the same mistakes. Second, it’s a beautiful picture gallery of flowers I owned that I can take with me everywhere and show to people!

Maybe you like that idea and want to keep an orchid journal yourself?

Personally I use Moleskines but anything goes, of course. To be honest, they are very expensive but that’s what makes them valuable. It’s not just another notebook I jot down any junk that comes to mind - I decide very carefully on what to put in there and especially how.

Photo by Bob Bob AuBuchon.

How To Grow Young Orchids Indoors, Pt. 2

Welcome to part two of How To Grow Young Orchids Indoors! As promised, today we will talk about the second important prerequisite of growing orchids indoors: Humidity.

As much as orchids enjoy sunlight, they enjoy humidity, especially the wild types. You need to pay close attention to the humidity in which you raise your young orchids. But if done wrong - coupled with wrong placement - it can be fatal. If the orchid is exposed directly to the sun and there are drops of water on the leaves, those drops concentrate the sunlight and direct it to the leaf or petal. In result the plant gets scorched much faster and you often don’t even see it happen because the water covers the “wound”. Now, this applies to all plants but while many can easily survive that, a delicate orchid might not recover.

For beginners it is sufficient to buy a simple water sprayer. Be generous with the water but don’t over do it, too. If you spray too much the water runs down the stem, sinks into the foundation which can result in rotting roots if the foundation is already saturated. More experienced growers often buy a hygrometer to monitor the humidity.

Many people say that orchids only bloom once a year but if you treat them right and pay close attention to all those important factors the flower will reward you with multiple blooming in a single year! This is an indicator of how comfy the flower feels.

I know, I know… there is so much you have to pay attention to - you can easily forget about something. But I can assure you: The effort and time it takes to learn it is totally worth it! Watching something grow fulfills me with deep joy and especially young orchids reward your care and love with their simple beauty! Wrong handling of humidity and lighting were the major mistakes I made when I started out. I learned a lot and I advise you to pay close attention to all the factors that influence the growth of your little beauties.

Photos by zalgon and Cesar R.

How To Grow Young Orchids Indoors, Pt. 1

Many of you probably want to raise their young orchids indoors! So today I will tell you a couple of things you need to know if that’s what you want to do!

Last time we talked about how the right growing medium is so important for young orchids. We also learned that it is not always soil that is neccessary, so instead of calling it soil, we call it “growing medium”, or foundation. The foundation is an important part of an orchid’s habitual environment but not the only one - The right lighting and the perfect amount of humidity are important too!

So, if you want to grow orchids indoors you better start finding a good place to put them!

Let’s start with lighting. Like most other plants, orchids like sunlight but it can be deadly for them to be exposed directly to it. Direct sunlight scorches the leafs and petals just like we get sun burns from too much exposure. But we still enjoy and need the sun, don’t we? Yep, and so do they!

Now, you need to find a well-lit cozy place where the young orchids would fit in neatly. During the first couple of days watch the orchids very closely. If the leaves start to turn brownish they are getting too much exposure - time to try a shadier place! If you keep that up you will soon find the perfect place. Also note that young orchids often don’t need as much light as more mature ones. As your orchids grow you will have to adjust the lighting or they might not bloom anymore.

Again, it’s a good idea to look into the background of your orchid. Some orchid hybrids are more robust than others. For instance, there are types that are perfect for the living room and some that are perfect for the hall. I can’t stress how benefitial it is to do some upfront research!

To give an example, my mother keeps her mature ones in the big window of our living room and the young orchids in the slightly shadier bedroom window. Places like that are often just perfect! Tomorrow we will talk about humidity. Again, I hope I could help you a bit. Please let me know what you think! I’m very excited about this whole blog thing.

Photo by tinyfroglet.

Choosing The Right Foundation For Young Orchids

Today I want to talk about something of high interest for beginners in raising young orchids - choosing the right soil, or as I call it, foundation.

Foundation? Why foundation?

As with any plant it is important to choose the right kind of soil right from the start. Young orchids have especially delicate roots so you need to pick a kind that lets the orchid grow its roots but on the other hand it needs to be dense enough to support the tender plant and take in moisture - or the roots will start to rot! If you want to know what kind of soil is best for your young orchids you need to look into where it originally came from. It’s best explained with an analogy:

Johnny loves fish (no not for food!). The sheer beauty of some fishes leave him in deep awe and he decides to keep some in a fish tank at home. Johnny would now go and decided what kind of fishes he would like to own but he can’t do that randomly. The fish have an original environment and you need to copy that environment as best as possible or they would die.

Makes sense? Yes, I thought so.

It’s all about habitual environment!

It’s the same with our young orchids. It wants to live in the soil it is used to. Now, I can’t give you a detailed explanation of what kind of soil each orchid would like, that’s way beyond my scope, but I would suggest you talk to a professional gardener about that or get a book on this topic.

By the way, did you know that most orchids don’t grow in usual soil? There are kinds of orchids that prefer to grow in sands or on bark. That’s because those orchids grow on the bark of trees in their natural environment.

My advice is that once you decided for the kind of orchid you would like to grow, go and do some research upfront. If it is necessary you can purchase orchid mediums such as special kinds of rock (volcano rocks for instance), bark and so on. Just spare yourself lots of frustration and go that short extra mile in advance, especially with young orchids - you won’t regret it.

I hope you found that useful! More stuff coming soon.

Love,
Jessie

Photos by wiccked, Chugy.

How I Got Hooked On Young Orchids

Hello fellow orchid lovers! Today I want to tell you the story of how I got hooked on young orchids. It all began with a dear friend of mine. She has the most beautiful garden I have ever seen! Often times we would sit outdoors, each of us enjoying a nice cup of coffee, and I would listen to her go on and on about her flowers. At first I thought it was so boring but I could feel that she really poured her heart into it. She talked with a kind of passion I have never seen before and even though I found it a bit silly, her burning passion eventually kind of “infected” me. I was growing seriously curious!

So I asked her…

She provided me with a couple of very young orchids and said to me: “Just give them love and show them you care. Their growth and beauty will reflect on the love you give”. Again, I had to hide a smirk. This was beyond corny! I was like “Susan, you really need a boyfriend!” - she frowned. I think she already knew inside that I wasn’t honestly taking her serious and she told me that she already has doubts about giving them to me.

And she was right. I tended the orchids - more so than my “normal” flowers. At first I thought I was doing everything right but over time they died and everything I tried just seemd to make it worse. I didn’t get it! Was it too much of that “love” Susan had talked about? Too little? The wrong kind of love? What the heck has happened all of a sudden? I spoke to Susan about it and she just shrugged, kind of coldly, and said “Told you so…”. I only just realized I had ridiculed a precious friend - made fun of her hobby - and I realized I only did it because I envied her for it. I apologized to her at once.

We talked a lot and well, long story short, I came to believe that everything Susan said was true: Orchids are a bit different than most flowers. They are sensible beings not only nurturing of the very soil you plant them in (well not exactly soil - but I will talk about that in a later post), but also on the love you give them.

Once again I was fired up and eager to try it again. Susan gave me another chance by providing me with new orchids and I believed that with her guidance I would succeed in raising these very young orchids into a bunch of superb beauties.

And that is how I got hooked on young orchids.

Now, I would be interested in your story! How did you get started with and attached to those lovely flowers?

Love,
Jessie

Photo by nds

Welcome To All About Mature And Young Orchids

Welcome to my blog all about young orchids!

Dear orchid lover,

if you found your way to this cozy little space on the web you are probably a passionate orchid lover like me! I intend to build a rich collection of information especially about young orchids. I think young orchids need special love and care so they can grow into the most beautiful things you can find on this planet. There are so many things you can do wrong which might kill your young orchids in its fragile childhood - so many things you need to look after.

About two years ago I was searching for help and guidance on how to take care of young orchids but I had been let down. Because I couldn’t find any quality material on that topic I did many mistakes. I want to share my knowledge with you so that you don’t make them!

You see, young orchids have a couple of special needs. Depending on their species they prefer different kinds of soils, potting, lighting, different amounts of water and - yes, i truly believe that - they even like to hear your voice!

From now on I will update this blog regularly to provide you, my fellow orchid lovers, with tons of free information on mature and young orchids.

Love, Jessie

P.S. This is my very first time putting content abount young orchids on the web so please bear with me if my style is kind of weird or something. I’m not a computer person. I would be very grateful for any kind of feedback, hints, tips or help!

Photograph by Christiane Michaud