Quote:
Originally Posted by Shadowmagic
One thing I do know is that people religiously blame light levels every time when it could be stress, temperature, humidity and lots of other factors too for their orchid not blooming.
Winter rest is important for those that need it - no rest no flowering but you can bet every last penny that the person in question will be scratching their head, wondering what the problem is, blaming too low light levels.
|
No religion here, a lot of observation and some science. First, there's light and then there's light. There's intensity (which can burn plants very easily, watch carefully because it can happen fast) and duration - how many hours a day the plant receives light. And spectrum. An outdoor-grown plant will get the natural spectrum of light, reproducing it indoors can be a challenge. And the whole thing is made more complicated for those growing indoors in higher latitudes, since sun shifts seasonally, at lower angles the higher wavelengths of the spectrum are filtered out by the atmosphere. I can say that with Phals, when I was growing them in the house, I went from essentially no reblooming to about 80% reblooming by adding supplemental light 12 hours a day. (took about a year to see the effect.. other factors such as temperature range stayed the same) Your experience may be different. Experience is the biggie here... observe, tweak conditions a little, observe some more.
Temperature differential is another factor - house temperatures tend to be very even. In nature, even in the tropics, there is significant day-night variation. Seasonal variation depends hugely on location - elevation as well as latitude.
As far as rest... that's another "it depends". I have learned (by killing several plants) that "dry" doesn't mean "bone dry" in most cases (Catasetinae somewhat and some of the summer-dormant Mediterranean-climate terrestrials are exceptions). In monsoonal areas where summers are wet and winters have little rain, there's still dew and humidity. There is a huge orchid-species nursery near me (like about 7000 species, somewhere in the neighborhood of 3/4 million plants) that I visit often (usually leaving significant amounts of cash behind
), and have noted that the deciduous Dens, etc. are in the same area as everything else with the same temperature requirements. Everybody gets watered all year. The secret? Nearly everything is mounted, and so they all dry out quickly. Those Dens don't particularly get "rested" but they bloom anyway. (I think the owner, Andy Phillips, knows a thing or two about growing orchids, so I don't judge based on stuff I have read, I observe what works - even if it breaks the "rules" - and try to understand why so I can apply the observations to my own plants. I do know that Andy's plants don't have internet access, and besides they can't read. But Andy has not only years of experience but also the intellectual curiosity, and multiple plants of the same type with multiple microclimates, to experiment. And I get the benefit of all that by observation.)
So in short - it's all about learning the needs of each plant type, then experimenting - even those who live in areas that are natural for some types of orchids are likely to be growing plants that are native to someplace else. So everything we do is a compromise... the challenge is to find that sweet spot where what we can provide is a set of conditions that our orchids can adapt to.
Linear Mode
