How did you get started with orchids?

[samarak]

Bought an amabalis type phalaenopsis for $7 at a garden show at the local mall in about 1977 or so because I had read the Rex Stout books. (Leafmite, you and Troy Meyers and I share the Stout link.) I still have that plant, though I have killed hundreds of other orchids since and no doubt will kill again.

[Cactuseed]

great topic leafmite !
By my mid 20's I had visited several botanical gardens and was fascinated with the cacti & succulents. I can't remember seeing a single orchid, but I started collecting cacti and growing them from seed. I then built a plant stand for them and put it by a south facing sliding glass door. At some point I bought a reed stem epidendrum and put it in a clay pot with fern fiber (cheapo then) and it took off growing and blooming. But I did not catch the bug.
Well its 20+ years later and I still have some of the cactus & succulents i started from seed (notably a saguaro & huge agaves). But - One summer I was with family at a rented beachhouse and there was a shriveled up orchid wasting away. We watered it and put it where it would get some light & humidity for the week, then we went home. Next year we were back - it was still alive but a little worse condition. I took a backbulb home & rooted it. Now its thriving (it is a dend thongchai gold) and Yadda yadda yadda I now own about 20 other orchids and have a grow room.

[Leafmite]

The Rex Stout mysteries are really great books!

[rosemadder]

Flowers with no fragrance depress me. Especially big, colorful, impressive ones. Like roses-- everybody knows that roses are supposed to SMELL LIKE ROSES. When they don't, it's like my hindbrain is convinced it's not a real flower-- it's a fake one, almost plastic. I feel somehow betrayed. I can't stand fake plants, or cut flowers. Why display a dead/dying thing in your living space when you could have a live one instead??

So I have always felt scorn for the common phals you see everywhere in stores-- they're gorgeous, but oh so disappointing up close.

My mother is a botanist. Growing up I would always see her mixing soil and potting things, gardening in the yard and such-- but we lived in the desert, and she's very much into native plants, so most of her collection consists of succulents. They grow suuuuper slowly, hardly any of them actually bloom, and you get no nice leafy clean smell from them. They don't FEEL like plants to me. She also has a few big white phals.. with no smell, of course. I didn't have the patience to mess with it on my own, so I never bothered.

Now I live in San Francisco, in Zone 10 instead of 5 back home. Damn near anything grows here, but in the city it's all pavement. Coming from out in the boonies on a river just below the mountains, to this, I think after 5 years the lack of nature in my environment finally reached critical mass and I started to freak out.

I started out with a planted tank and freshwater tropical fish. Planted tanks are awesome for immediate gratification. When you have a co2 system, it becomes very obvious when the plants are happy; oxygen bubbles start floating out of them, which can make the whole tank look like a champagne bottle. So I got to practice studying plant growth and noticing their changes over time. Patience manifested somewhere in there.

As it happens the biggest orchid show in North America, the Pacific Orchid Expo, is here in SF pretty much just down the street from where I work. Several years a friend took me with her. For the first time I saw orchids that SMELL LIKE SOMETHING-- gasp! Shock! Excitement!-- and suddenly they got a LOT more interesting. And I saw the colors on the purple Vandas, and I'm such a fiend for purple I wanted one even though they had no fragrance. My friend ordered me one for my birthday, but she forgot to pick it up from the post office, and it was all sortof forgotten for a while. It brewed in the back of my brain, stewing and stewing-- but I kept missing the show. This year I planned ahead-- dammit I'm GOING, with intent to BUY-- and ended up buying 4.

The chocolate-scented dendrobiums make me a little nauseous for some reason. The coconut smells are cute, but a little too candy-like. Then put my face into a Dendrobium kingianum and HOLY CRAP I MUST HAVE ONE. When I got it home I had to put it outside because it was overwhelming the entire house. (THAT'S MORE LIKE IT! :devil ) Then I found the Sunset Valley Orchids booth. Clowesia Jumbo York smells like mysterious lemons. Fdk 'Black Pearl' smells like magical cloves (and is BLACK, and how is that not awesome?). There were many more whose names I didn't catch, running from incredibly sweet to rich and musky. I wanted everything there, and went home with Black Pearl's cheaper sibling. I even found one, single, phal reputed to be fragrant-- the itty bitty mini Phal lowii. (although it was already half-dead and I seem to be finishing it off )

I should have waited to see if my first few (expensive, rare, and challenging) plants would survive before buying more. But no. I've got another 5 since then. (...Well, 4, but upon repotting one fell into two halves and turned out to be TWO separate plants, so...)

I've done a bunch of research and worked up a list of several dozen more I'd like to try out. I got two very large shelves for my living room windows, and I've started digging up the whole yard for plants of all sorts.

I'm very lucky to even HAVE a yard (such as it is) in San Francisco. If I ever have to move and up in a tiny place with no windows... um.., well, I'll be getting some major lighting fixtures and hoping I can keep enough space to navigate between my door and the bathroom...

[RosieC]

My mum gave me a phal for my birthday one year. I never expected to rebloom it as I assumed it was one of those plants that needed specialist care to bloom. However I like plants and kept it after the flowers were gone, stumbling on the correct way to water it. Then it surprised me by growing a new spike and blooming again.

So how did I go from one to about 80... well it's silly... I decided to buy orchid fertilizer but the one I bought was aimed at mixing in larger quantities than I needed... solution... buy a couple more

I then repotted the first and almost killed it in the process, so I came here looking for help... saw all the wonderful pictures... realized phals weren't the only type of orchid... and the collections started to grow and grow and grow

[Orchidbyte]

I have been growing plants since I was 9, always had plants inside and out, when I was about 17 I saw a nursery called Paradise and went in expecting to find regular plants, instead I met a guy named Gary Hammer who was a well known orchid and plant hunter.

At his nursery were all these odd looking plants, they were either hanging by a wire or mounted or just laying on the ground on tarps, so I asked and found out he had just gotten back from Mexico on an orchid collecting trip, he said those odd looking plants are orchids and he gave me a rundown on what he had and how they grow, I was hooked and interested.

So I bought a couple and started doing research on orchids and fell in love with the pictures. A couple of months later I was in Mexico with Gary collecting orchids off of downed trees and areas that were going to be used for farms and building. So we saved many orchids and countless other plants like ferns, bromeliads and several others.



That was over 40 years ago and I find that I still enjoy and love orchids and all other plants.

[terracotta7]

I got started with orchids because my mother visited Carter and Holmes when she was visiting my sister in SC. She knows I like plants, and apparently there were tables of seedlings there that were inexpensive, so she would bring one home for me each time. The ones she brought for me were a cattleya and a dendrobium.

As I tried to get these orchids to bloom, I had to do some research and I just kept learning and finding out about the many different varieties that exist and I wanted to try each one that I thought would be OK in my window.

Just today I started a new index card system to keep track of my orchids, because I now have 50, give or take. I say that because my relatives and friends and the nursing home where my sister works give me their orchids (mostly phals) and I try to repot and rebloom them and give them back. So they come and go.

This hobby has been such a blessing to me as I care for my aging parents with their many health concerns. Like my garden outside, my orchids are great therapy!!!!