I think I may have forgotten to post some videos up on here?
It is not January 11th 2015, which oddly enough is my late grandmothers birthday who would have loved my getting into Orchids. I plan to do much more with Orchids this year than I did last year.
Already and just before Christmas while admittedly not planned I ended up in McBean's Nursery outside Lewes in Sussex. While their I ended up being bought a small species of Slipper Orchid, by a brother, and I grabbed to Odontoglossums in flasks. Well...urine specimen bottles to be precise.
Now the odd thing is before I decided I wanted the tiny flasks, as sthis was something I wanted to but and become involved with working with within a couple of years, I wanted to know what they would like like. Often flasks are hybrids between two parents witht he intention of finding something pretty ... well pretty, exceptionally beautiful.
Think of it is many Holy Grails within the world of Orchids. Produce something truly spectacular and you get dibs on all the early ones and you get to name it after your nursey and you get notoriety. In theory.
Often when you purchase flasks you are buying into this gamble...sort of.
Now with these flasks something went awry because I chatted with the friendly and helpful chap there and I had spotted these really fantastic lemon coloured Odontoglossums and he siad they should look like those, I immediately grabbed both flasks.
Only two days later when I was looking at their names to try and find pictures on the Internet of the parents I noticed something. The family, or genus, name for the Orchids was labelled as 'Oncid.' and not 'Odont.'?!
I had made an error...a bad one. Now there are a lot of Oncidiums I like but are mostly botanical ones but the ones normally seen in most nurseries are the ones often called names like 'Dancing Ladies' or 'Sweet Sugar' and have great shaped flowers, albeit very small but with a hugely oversized lip at the bottomg that is four times the size of the rest of the flower. These are always brilliant yellow. Now the flowers themselves are a great shape and the colour of mostly vivid canary yellow but with a few reddish brown striped on the tiny petals and sepals and the uniform yerllow giant lip. But it is the lip that lets them down for me.
Yes I do actually own an Oncidium of this type, it is true. But it was more out of pity for the state of the plant than it was tham being on my wanted list. Which they are not. So it was now bloody weird that I now had three of the damn things!! Lol.
Only I didn't have three of them.
AFtewr searching the Internet I failed tp ick up on the fact that a great deal of Odontoglossum like flowers kept coming up in the search. This happaned about half a dozen times before I started clicking on them to take a greater look and eventually I found that there had been a change in taxonomy? And another bad one it seems and I realised these really bad name and taxonimic changes are not restricted to herpetology, ichthyology and batrachology.
So I am back to having two Odontoglossums and just like Morelia viridis and many others will still be Chondropython viridis to me and thousands of others, so these will always be Odontoglossums because some scientists, or maybe many scientists, seem to miss the obvious POINT?!
Anyhoo recently it came around to the time when the Odontoglossums needed to be removed from their flasks and repotted. The agar solution was shrinking and the confines of the flasks were now proving to be exactly that, confines.
SO I managed to acquire a bag of Levington's Orchid compost from a nursery 500 yards from me that I buy my Orchid food from but for some reason forgot about them when I went to B&Q looking fdor the sdame compost that was the only one out of stock?!
Yeah B&Q because it makes sense not to order in the only compost anyone would use in the winter months?! My bloody God!
Anyway I filmed myself removing them from the flasks and then potting them up, so tp speak...
