Orchids in bloom Sept 30,2013

[imafan26]

It has been raining a few days. I went outside and found these guys in bloom. There are a few others but I can only upload three.

[evtubbergh]

So awesome. They are terribly exotic here and you have to tend to them all the time because it's dry, cold, hot and everything wrong here. My in laws live in the low-lying areas where it's perfect for them and they also grow in the garden there. So lucky!

[imafan26]

I get fairly good flowers but if I really did the weekly weakly fertilizing=I used to do that but not now
regular fungicide=I don't do that
pest control = I put out slug bait, but the slugs are winning
repotting every 2 years=I kill most of my plants when I repot or move them
staking and tying =I need to do it soon enough. Most of the time it is like this day I went out and saw the blooms. I only saw the sheath on the catleya and didn't even know the others had budded, and orchids take a long time to get ready to bloom.
Had a real shade house = I have trees, a fence and shaded benches.

If I fertilized, fungicide, sprayed, repotted, staked and tied and kept the orchids in perfect lighting, and did not over water them regularly, I'd have great plants , and I would have to spend a lot more time and money on them.

But, I have other things to take care of and I am trying to go pesticide free in the back yard where I have most of the orchids and the vegetable garden. I stopped using pesticides in the front yard too since the pests I have are resistant and I want to try to bring the natural predators back. The vegetable garden, except for the slugs is actually doing great without the pesticides.

I have about 300 orchids, a relatively small collection here but fairly stable for me. Some of the people in my orchid club have 10,000 orchids and they consume almost every inch of their back and side yards. I belong to two orchid clubs (9 yrs and 15 yrs. I get orchid seedlings almost every month to add to my collection and on safari I can get some nice orchids at a very reasonable price. I have gotten a couple of culture awards (amazing, good thing the flowers are the most important judging criteria, I don't get awards for culture itself). I have a few orchids that do really well and I can actually divide without killing them so I have multiples of those. I also have enough orchids that I almost always have an orchid coming in or out of bloom. So, I just enjoy the orchids when they give me the present of their bloom. And hopefully, it will remind me to feed them again.

[applestar]

Beautiful! It's funny how the criteria for keeping them, while similar on some points, are so different for us.

It'll be a while before I can go back to trying to keep different cultivars again -- I'm back down to Phals which are super easy.

Garden Patrol for slugs -- we had a very wet season this year with consistent rain every week. Surprisingly however, I had less slug problems. I think it was because the rains maintained wet and boggy areas longer allowing fireflies and dragonflies to complete their life cycles. Also, I think toads did a lot better this year than in years with drought. A few days ago, I saw what I thought was a frog swimming around in a shallow container on the patio in which water had collected. I hadn't been dumping it out because there was a big spider web over it and it seemed like there were no mosquitoes breeding in it at all. Had no idea where it had come from and hadn't noticed it (or tadpoles, etc. earlier stages) in there prior to this. Well, I happened to kill a slug so I chopped it in half and dropped it in the container for the amphibian. Later that day, the visitor was gone, and so was the slug. I guess it was hopping around and wanted to get wet.