walmart

[johnblagg]

Have several that came from walmart they do well it is a matter of making a good choice when you are buying not so much the plants ....

rules for buying a walmart phal ...

1 - get them as quick as they caome in the store ...after a week or two they have been mishandeled by everyone including cutomers looking at them

2 - inspect it well at the store look at the roots if it in a decorative pot it is most likley also in a plastic pot inside that.Take and look at roots and for bugs.Look at spike look at buds ...are the buds a little withered thye will prob drop if so.

3 - Dont expect it to have had great care from the moment it left the grower it has been in a semi truck in heat in cold dry maybe watered by a truck driver that had a break down....in general who knows
and then it got unloaded at the back door in god knows what weather and shoved into walmarts shipping and recieving area.....
one shock after another but still looking good enought to catch your eye ...and quite often if you got lucky and it has just arrived in store in amazingly good shape for all this ....lets face it chids are tough at least the ones sold in wal mart are most time or they would not carry them......

bottom line inspect it closely and decide if you want to buy it or not ...I have 8 that came from wal mart and home depo and both buy the same stock from just add ice ...ect. they do .....fine I repot as soon as they are bought and I dont pay attention to directions on the labels.They are almost always in spike and they almost always repotted or not are going to drop buds from bad handeling ......and this includes your putting them in the back seat in the solar oven of a car with no shade full sun in 120 degree weather ....then turning on the ac and zaping it down to what?

LOL I am rambling the bottom line is that the chids can suck at wal mart but it a matter of timing and attention to detail not bad plants any plant at wal mart is going to be a bad plant in time they are not going to devote time to actualy growing them .....buy ....set out on rack....sell......if they dont move shove to dumpster

[RosieC]

John had some very good advice for supermarket orchids. I still get tempted by them and bought another just a few months ago.

I agree Matt above, as a beginner it's a good idea to try on orchids that are not very expensive (although online ones from a good grower are often comparable price).

I bought supermarket ones for a long time, then for arround 6 months I kept saying... I'm only going to buy from orchid growers now because I have enough of the type they sell in supermarkets... but those supermarket ones still kept jumping in with my groceries

It's only the last month that I have actually found it easy to walk away from the supermarket ones, and I bet I'll still get the odd one or two more.

If you follow Johns good advice then you can get some good stuff at the supermarket. I just think you can get a wider range and choice from good orchid growers. For a long time I only saw the supermarket ones and I thought all Phals looked like those ones... suddenly looking at a growers site (and here on OB) I realised the stuff you get there is a very limited selection of what actually exists in the world of Phals (same goes for the other genuses you can get at the supermarket).

[RosieC]

Oh yeah... and our local Walmart/Asda has a habit of displaying their orchids in the chiller section

If they have been in the chiller section for any lenght of time they will probably be in a bad way. I only buy them when they look like they have only just arrived.

(Walmart bought the UK chain Asda and this particular store is actually labled as Walmart while most of them are still labled Asda)

[Rosiefuture]

Wow, I didn't know Walmart bought out Asda. I was brought up in the UK and moved to Oz almost 20 years ago. I lived near Heathrow.

We don't have Walmart here in Oz but my first 8 phals were from Bunnings and most of them were in very bad condition. They seem to like me as they have all survived. I had been growing orchids for years but didn't have any that I grew indoors. Phals were new to me so I didn't want to buy expensive ones, mind you all orchids are expensive in Western Australia.

I've bought Phals from Bunnings, Ikea and two florist shops so they are all Noids. Last week I went to the big orchid nursery up north of Perth and bought 7 named phals. 4 are tiny with leaves only about 2 inches long but one has a spike already! The other 3 are slightly bigger with leaves about 3 inches and 2 of them have spikes too.

Marion