Sorry ... lots and lots happening right now and all will become clear soon. Umm they currently are not clear to me right now! Lol!
Did this video several days ago and have been trying to upload it to YouTube ever since! In fact I am sure there are several other things I have filmed and photographed I need to upload?!
Anyhoo my Blue Bamboo Orchid, Dendrobium victoriae-reginae, has not only produced more than one clump of flowers it has now gonee mad and produced five or six clumps?!
So here is a video of it and I will try and get some pictures up ... umm if I took pictures?! I think I did? Trouble with one of my health conditions is one of the many things it does is screw around several times daily with short term memory! I will not go into the pain list nor the other 80 things it does, lol. Or my blood pressure going both way too high and way too low, or my Hiatus Hernia or Right Knee or my Oesophagitis! Hehe.
None of the above ... well OK one thing is causing me issues of late, the blood pressure going to both extremes and the cheap crap pills they keep putting me on and then taking me off again.
I am in the dark with my 'lots of things going on' which is exacerbating the blood pressure problem, lol.
But all will be good in the end ... and I now am at the end, thank God!
Now for a little video of a very nice Blue Orchid ...
Well I am pleased to report that my very, very tiny orchid species orchid of Schoenorchis fragrans has flowered due to my increase in feed and an addition of another couple of 20 watt LED lights I bought from Sainsbury's Homebase for £5.99 each!
That is now two orchids that have flowered for the first time on me that are both species, or botanical orchids, from two completely different families, or genus.
The first of these was the Samurai Orchid, or Neofinitia fulcata and now this one ... umm wondering if I posted up the Neofinitia?! Lol.
It is true to say I have been a little ... preoccupied with regards a subject that my most popular blog covers.
This has held back my other blogs somewhat, along with the highly variable weather, especially my British wildlife blog.
This s because something has occurred several months earlier than ... well, than I expected it to in all honesty by about 6 months. This is a very big thing and though I do mention this on the blog in question I do not go into detail. Just trust me it is big and over the next couple of months it will change everything. For the better.
I have to be even more preoccupied than ever before with this said subject and for at least a month ... maybe three or four. It is simply impossible to say. Despite the in depth knowledge I have within this particular blog's posts and it may seem like I can predict, work out and appear to know everything ... well, I do not. Some things I literally have to take a stab at and hope I am in the ballpark. From time to time I am not.
Sometimes these stabs are completely obvious by which then I will state so.
But before I get preoccupied with this other ... matter I decided that recent activity with my Orchids should be posted up before things go a bit ... well, nuts.
I have several Orchids in flower and an even greater number with buds and I only hope that I manage to catch those in flower in the coming weeks in picture and film and post on the Internet.
I have several Moth Orchids, Phalaenopsis, in flower and a few in bud.
I have also now, this morning, noticed that my Dendrobium victoriae-reginae has a few buds on it and I dare say more will appear over the next couple of weeks?
My Vanda coerulea is in bud, or the very early stages, and I fear this one might be missed, though it is several weeks from producing flowers.
Here are a few pictures and videos of them ...
Dendrobium victoriae-reginae ..
Ahh yes ... new LED bulbs I spotted in Sainsury's Homebase for stupidly cheap money and very high wattage. Well high for an LED. AT £6 each I decided to get TWO! They are 20W each so now are hooked up alongside my 16W and 19W Toshiba E-Core bulbs. It is VERY bright now, lol.
Annoyingly I have been trying to add new E-Cores for two years but the prices have increased markedly and I have been pushed for time too.
Well here is that video and finally I have uploaded it and now to link it in here.
These Orchids are simply stunning and for such a small Orchid too. Fleshy and succlulent like leaves in an almost tiny Vanda like build but with what looks like miniature versions of Phalaenopsis zebrina flowers.
I just remembered that many of those Phalaenopsis, which I do have, of zebrina, hieroglyphica, sumtrana and the like only produce one flower at a time but acn produce several flowers in quick succesion.
These Trichoglottis can have more than one and while this one currently has four flowers there is another spike appearing so might end up with 6 or 7? If the flowers are long lasting that is? Could be that they might only last a week and the spikes take two weeks to flower?
Trichoglottis pusilla is a tiny species orchid with really neat but very small flowers. Looking a bit like another botanical species, Phalaenopsis zebrina, but with smaller flowers and a totally different plant type. In fact the plant, which is also small, looks more like a tiny Vanda than it does a Phalaenopsis and only a few inches across.
Well my Trichoglottis pusilla completely surprised me by showing me some well developed buds!
Cool!
A bit late getting this video, and several others, uploaded on here and I already have a video of this Orchid with four flowers ... err or five completely out and with another spike appearing!
Take a look ..
The video of the plant with four flowers out will appear in the next week ... plus there is a third spike so might be another with 6 or 7 flowers on it?
Now these two Cymbidiums blooming were achieved by leaving them out until they had three nights of hard frost. Yes I am aware that many books state that they should not go below 7 degrees celsius at night...but I tend to ignore the accepted rules because everyone writes about what they do which is just copying what someone else has already done.
So after first surprising a few people at leaving them outside at such cold temperatures and with frost on at least three nights I have now got them to flower for the first time in several years, well since purchase in fact!
Well at long last the flowers are slowly appearing and the first lot of buds I spotted have been overtaken. One of the two spikes on one Cymbidium has had about three buds open with a few left on one spike, The other spike has had none of the buds open as yet.
The other one is turning out to be a red Cymbidium which I thought was a Lilac Cymbidium that today I started to recall a vision of throwing that particular Cymbidium out?! Odd, but then I do have this damned condition that cuses short term memory loss. Mind you it would have been over a year ago I thrrew it out.
I was expecting one of the three Cymbidiums that were orihginally one plant to be the one with the bigger buds but these are canary yellow flowers whereas these are clearly red. I purchased the two now flowering at the exact same time, oddly enough?!
I did a little video and will do another when all the buds have opened..
After its best part opf a year sulk, due to carbon monoxide that I bloody well knew they would not like, the Blue Orchid of Vanda coerulea has flowered once again.
Now rather bizarrely it is at a totally different part of the year it has flowered before and it is in flower right now. Added to this is the fact that it only has two flowers and is by far the worst show of flowers it has had since I obtained it!
I am entirely convinced that in a few months it will flower again and will have over double the amount of flowers it has this time around.
Also and like the Bulbophyllum earlier in the year it bloody well flowered with both the flowers facing the wall!
Typical!
Also you will see my species Phalaenopsis still surviving in the video and my newly acquired Paphiopedilum primulinum which is a miniature sized Slipper Orchid flowers thats bright yellow?!
My brother very kindly purchased this for me at McBean's Nursey just outside Lewes in East Sussex when we found ourselves their unexpectedly just before Christmas.
I picked up those Odontoglossums in those tiny flasks (Urine Specimen Bottles) which should turn out to have a yellow flower in two years or so when they do flower?
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!
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...
