Australia Dendrobium speciosum

[kg5]

There is an orchid seller called Australian Orchid Nursery and every Australia Day Holiday they have a 20% off sale cashing in on their name "Australia". Which is great place to buy the different Dendrobium speciosum's they have on offer.

Have never realised there are so many Dendrobium speciosum and their crosses.

Only have 5 different at present and this number will not increase till 26th Jan 2019. As this is special discount day again.

I like to buy my orchids in 50mm or 2" pots. With a min 10 of each. It is also the time to just see how much last year plants have grown.

My 2 new additions.

One plant called Dendrobium speciosum double grandiflorum 'Beranghi Gold' x 'Rockpile' And another Dendrobium speciosum Bee Creek x grandiflorum Beranghi Gold.

[estación seca]

Originally Posted by kg5

...I like to buy my [Dendrobium speciosum] in 50mm or 2" pots.

How long do they take to bloom from that size in Australia?

[kg5]

They take about 5 years to flower from that size.

I believe I have the original Australia Dendrobium speciosum which I got about 43 years ago. It was the only one back then to my knowledge.

It seems to flower mostly every 2nd year after division but when it got to its biggest size of 1m or 3' x .6m or 2' it would give me around 30 flower spike per year at basically the same time.

Now the plant is small after cutting out a huge amount of back bulbs and it did not flower this year.

Strange as this plant dies back to a smaller plant every 10 years or so.

[Dollythehun]

How do you care for the speciosum? From that 2" pot it takes 5 years to bloom?

[kg5]

Thank you for the question.

Our climate here never really has a dormant period.

At the worst we get what we call cold weather for about 2 weeks spread over all of winter.

The plants never seem to stop growing here.

Use liquid sea weed called seasole once a month with a pinch of growing fert & the next month flowering fert.

The 1st image are of Dendrobium soft canes and hard canes close to 12 months old.



This is an image of the in coming plants size speciosum .





These were the same size 12 months ago speciosum .

[smweaver]

I envy you for being so close to that nursery. Their online photos of Dendrobium speciosum (especially the grandiflorum variety) make me nearly drool every time I look at them. I would probably do quite a bit of damage to my bank account to obtain a few of the adult or blooming-size plants.

I like the pictures that show the growth differences between years. It's been my experience also that this species can put on a tremendous amount of growth when it's happy. I have a few large plants and a couple dozen seedlings in all stages of growth. We tend to see a lot of inter-varietal plants over here. So I'm glad to see that AON actually has a lot of the "pure" (singular?) varieties that they're breeding as well.

Congratulations on your purchases. They look to be very healthy plants.

Steve

[kg5]

Thank you for the kind words Steve.

Always Happy Growing. John

[estación seca]

I have realized that in my conditions, Den. speciosum seedlings need a very large amount of water through the year just to survive. (And protection from rats.) There is a lot of stuff online about how drought-hardy these are, but that is for adult plants that survived childhood. They usually get very wet summers in habitat.

[kg5]

All my orchids get as much water as my Tillandsia's but have full sun from sunrise to 11am then 60% shade. They grow very well here doing that.

My wife's cat go for the rats.

So I just purchased this lot from Australian Orchid Nursery again. Must admit the extra size is like a large discount for me.

Dendrobium speciosum grandiflorum 'Katrina' x grandiflorum 'Mount Larcom Gold' 50mm extra large.

[No-Pro-mwa]

Nice looking bunch of seedlings.