Thank you, Mauro. That was actually a lot of help. It's always helpful to find out how other growers raise their plants.
Don, while I don't have a greenhouse, I do have a large south-facing sunroom where the orchids spend the winter. It's completely unshaded and gets lots of light--so much so that I have to limit what I grow to plants that tend to like a lot of light (no phalaenopsis or paphiopedilum species, unfortunately). Between late spring and early fall, all of the orchids go outside and spend those months on my southeast-facing porch, where, over the course of a few weeks, they get acclimated to handling direct sun between around 7:00 A.M. and noon--or at least that's what they were getting before one of my neighbor's tall trees was damaged late last fall and he had to have it removed from his yard. That tree had provided a nice degree of shading between noon and 4:00 P.M. during the warmest part of the day. Now that it's gone I'm finding that the sun remains on my plants until around 2:30 P.M., which I'm pretty sure is approaching the danger zone as far as how much light the plants should be subjected to. So I might end up having to move many of the orchids back under the eaves of the porch in order to give them some protection after noon. I'm sure that our summer light levels are nowhere near what they are in Mauro's area, but between the high humidity, warm temperatures and sunshine, it usually feels like Singapore here during the main growing season. So right now I'm trying to figure out just how much sunshine my cattleyas can handle (again, assuming that they're slowly acclimated to the higher light levels). The only catt' species that I've personally found to be less happy in the direct sunshine--even the early-morning light--are dowiana and mossiae. C. leuddemanniana and L. purpurata seem to like all of the bright light just fine. The real oddball is C. labiata. I have a labiata alba that does very nicely in higher light levels. But I don't think that the labiata rubra enjoys that much light (its leaves tend to start getting pink-purple color if I put it in the same light as the alba plant gets). So apparently I now need to experiment a bit to see which plant will react favorably to the higher levels of summer light and which will need to be better protected (which was why, Mauro, I had asked you about your light levels in Brazil).
Steve
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