Is this ordinary or extraordinary result?

[DavTom]

Hi All, my name is Davide. I am Italian and I live in The Netherlands since 2008. Since just a couple of years I have happily accepted the "challenge" to grow some orchids. I am fascinated by challenges...Before accepting this challenge, I have happily accepted another one growing planted aquariums, the ones in which the plants are the main focus and the fish become just a nice-to-have... ;-) Let's call them underwater gardens rather than aquariums ;-)

After 5 or so years of mistakes and a lot of wasted money too!, I finally learned how to make plants thriving underwater and I have really learned a lot of things there...and now, why not applying this knowledge to grow orchids too? My assumption was that the principles are the same (i.e., you have to achieve a sweat-spot/balance of many parameters, in which some are much more important than others, and achieving this equilibrium underwater should be more challenging than "above" water) and the first results seem to prove that!

Now, I get to the point...I have bought two very common Phalaenopsis from a shop in June 2020 and immediately applied "the aquarium knowledge" on both. By November 2020 they were both blooming and then...they kept blooming flowers after flowers in huge numbers and healthy size without stopping with multiple spikes per plant. Each spike of flowers lasts between 4 and six months. By the time that spike of flowers fades away, new spikes have bloomed. So, there are always a lot of flowers. This is still going on now that I am writing this post. In a nutshell I am having a continuous blooming since almost one year and it looks like it will keep going like that.

Since I have very limited experience with orchids, I am asking myself whether this is just some good and ordinary achievement or something extraordinary.

If you are interested I can share the details about all the "things" I am doing to these two orchids. It is quite a lot of staff and it gets quite technical too...

Please let me know your thoughts.

Thanks you.

Ciao,
Davide