ORCHIDS & ME

Sunday, 11 January 2015

MY FIRST EVER CYMBIDIUM BUDS

OK this is one I forgot to link up on here!

On Boxng Day evening I noticed some large buds among my Orchids than confused me because they looked both really large and very alien to me! I had never seen these buds before!

As I followed the spike down to its base I realised it came from one of my Cymbidiums?!

Oddly there was another pot with a curiously bulblous growth on it I thought may turn out to be a collection of buds and it seemed to be coming along very slowly.

A couple of days later I then realised I was not paying close enough attention because on the far said of the poot from where I thought buds may emerge another lot DID emerge, so yes may well be two spikes on a second Cymbidium flowering?!

Now I have no looked through them all buit just in case people were not paying attention, errr or I forgot to mention it in a post on here or my YouTube account and you are now wondering what I did to get them to flower?

Well someone noticed in December that my Cymbidiums were outside still! IN fact I told everyone that I was fed up with them not flowering or look tatty that I have a theory I am putting to the test and that they can think of it as a ' Kill of Flower Cure'. The theory was based on this common belief that the flowering is triggered by large changes in day and night temperatures being ... well WRONG! Lol!

They normally came back indoors in October or even early November but this year they was out until just a few days before Christmas day itself and i case you do not live in the UK, this included several nights that included a hard frost.

Yes I said a HARD FROST!

Umm I did say 'Kill of Flower Cure'?

Yes well my understanding of animals led me to the fact that the commonly held belief about Cymbidiums could be wrong and as everyone mostly just re-writes what everyone else states about Orchids and sticks to 'the rules' the truth never gets discovered.

I will give you a clue that it gets damn cold in the Himalayas and I also have a Vanda coerulea that I also know can take cold and have seen them covered in snow!

So is a film I made of the buds ...

THE ODONTOGLOSSUM FLASKS

Right then?

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...

Sunday, 16 November 2014

THE RETURN OF THE ORCHIDS

Well it has been awhile and like with a dozen other of my blogs and for vareious reasons, one bing three months of a really crappy illness still under investigation, my blogs have been neglected...yet again.

I am afraid it is what happens when various public services are not a service and quite the opposite in being an hinderence and actually stop you from doing things and keeping active instead of actually helping in the ways they were created for in the first place.

Still does not matter, it is all part of the traps and the processess of my ever more popular blogs on corruption and will all come out in the wash. A lot sooner than many realise too.

Anyhoo there are a few things I have managed to do and...acquire that I have not been able to get around to upload either here are the varioous blogs which link up to the different things I cover, know or have learned to do.

Now one of these is here and at last another Orchid video and my Vanda coerulea, Dendrobium victoriae-reginae and my Bulbophyllum have finally all returned to flowering ways since being upset about some carbon monoxide!

The Dendrobium of those three came back into flowering with gusto and is still producing bulbs as I type!

Typical the Bulbophyllum was facing the wrong way!

The Vanda is not that far way from flowering so expect another video.

Also it is extremely late in the year for all three of these to flower so I am somewhat shocked at this! The Dendro was flowering twice a year pre CO wash. Even the second flowering was not this late in the year. Vanda only once a year so far but normally around June/July and the same for the Bulbophyllum I think if I remember correctly. Yet it is the 16th November as I type and the Vanda is still yet to flower, the Dendro still in flower and with a few more flower bulbs emerging and the Bulbophyllum just stopped flowering in the last 24 hours or so.

Here is the link to the video and expect another in a few weeks.