Do you have any pics to post? It's easier to see it I think.
For your fertilizer, I think that they recommend too much.
The prefered way to fertilize is to use a lower dose of fertilizer, but at each watering (but water with plain water every 4-5 watering to leach out the salts.) A target that many people use for phals and orchids with similar food requirements is to have 125ppm N (parts per million of nitrogen) at each watering. You can read more about this here:
Your Feeding Regimen There's a bunch of other nice stuff to read in the 'free info'. With your fert, that works out to about 1/2 teaspoon per gallon at each watering.
Btw, when you were mentioning how much you use, is tbs a tablespoon or teaspoon?