So I have a birthday coming up. I love plants, really anything green. And I love flowers. And my dad loves to spoil me with flowers. And he knows I love orchids. I read about them. Watch videos about them. But I confess, I have yet to successfully maintain a phalaenopsis. I do have a dendrobium that is still around. As a pre-birthday present, he let me pick out these Sunday afternoon.
A standard white phalaenopsis. it is huge! The flowering part of the spike is 17" itself!
Since that one is soooo big, I also got a miniature:
This is a miniature phalaenopsis: Flora gigi. The plant - pot included! - is only 10" tall.
So I got the plants early Sunday afternoon. I promptly started soaking bark. Technically you aren't supposed to repot phalaenopsis when they are in bloom, but since growers insist potting orchids in sphagnum moss, because it "looks pretty", you risk root rot if you let it go. So I soaked the bark, so it's soft enough to not damage roots when you repot. I gave both orchids a bath with alcohol to kill what scale insects I could see and then sprayed them with a water/alcohol/soap mixture to hopefully kill what I missed. And then I repotted. So we'll see how they make out. But for now, I'm enjoying the blooms while they last.
No comments:
Post a Comment