How did you get started with orchids?

[Leafmite]

My first two orchids were a vanda and a cattleya (seedlings) someone brought back from Hawaii because they knew I collected plants. Didn't really have much interest in them until I read the Rex Stout mysteries... then I had to have more. I still have the original two (very tough plants!).

I got a noId phal as a house-warming gift. It re-bloomed for me after a year. I bought few more. One of them had bad roots, in search of info I found this board and opened whole new world of all different orchid types beyond noIds from grocery store.
Since then - orchids pushed out all other plants from my house. I do still have that first phal responsible for it.

[The Orchid Boy]

In March 2011 I saw a complex yellow paph at a botanical gardens and LOVED it. It wasn't like most other complex paphs. It wasn't totally round and had a strange tear-drop shaped pouch. I bought my first noid phal from Lowes that night. My 4th orchid was a Paph. delenatii and I was hooked on slippers ever since. Now since I have a lot of the slipper species I wanted, I'm starting to get into the warmth tolerant masdevallias, mostly species. (If you have any suggestions pm me.) Like orchideya, orchids pushed all the other plants out of the house, except for the carnivorous ones.

[Bud]

I was waiting for my roommate at the employees entrance of the Hotel he was working when I noticed a nice blue porcelain pot with a plant that had colorful plastic butterflies and dried up flowers on top of the trash bin; the leaves were still perky and green....luckily I found a paper bag in the trash to put it in and took it home. My roommate must have been curious why I was rummaging thru the trash of his workplace. I was able to bloom it again on its original spike by not cutting it=my first NOID Phaleanopsis.
A couple of months after when my roommate brought home an orchid with seven long bulbs and four were fresh in bloom with two flowers in each spike(found a tag under the ribbons=Cattleya Abe Kher)from a table in a wedding reception in one of those ballrooms and they were about to throw it out....those were the first two orchids I ever had five years ago and still is with me up to now.

[Gage]

Years ago I gave my then girlfriend, now wife (YES!), a little purple Dendrobium. Not being a plant person, she neglected it to near death. By the time we got married it had no leaves, just bare shriveled canes. So thinking it probably wasn't going to make it I just shoved it under my plant table on the balcony. I pretty much forgot about it until it sprouted 2 or 3 keikis, which was exciting and intriguing. Then my wife was given a yellow Phalaenopsis when she left a job. Still knowing nothing about growing orchids other than a distant memory from childhood of someone saying you had to have a greenhouse to bloom an orchid, I did some online research and decided to repot it from moss into bark. When it shot up a spike the next fall I was pleasantly surprised that I not only had kept it alive, but it was blooming for me! Then I went to the Redland show and saw more shapes, sizes and colors of orchids than I could have imagined, and that did me in. I was hooked for life.

[WhiteRabbit]

I impulsively bought a Catt alliance intergeneric hybrid at a farmer's market - prior to that I had mostly only seen Phals commonly for sale, and I thought the Catt hybrid blooms looked so exotic! It's proven challenging to bloom, but refused to die no matter what I did wrong (neglected for months, over potted, over watered, etc ... )

[Pilot]

My grandmother, dads side, was a gifted gardener and it was the only thing at all that we bonded over. She was a resigned person and often intolerant of kids, no matter how behaved I was. Anyway, she grew so many beautiful plants and without knowing it, she cultivated a passion within me. I don't just grow orchids, though they are a passion. I grow a huge vegetable garden, citrus trees and a host of other weird plants. The orchid obsession began when my wife fancied a few at a local store and she gave them to me to keep alive. And so it goes...

[CR7cristiano]

Its almost ironic to say that I grew up being surrounded by orchids but just saw them as colourful flowers. My mom told me when I was a baby & young child I used to pick off every single bloom on the orchids she put on the tables when they were in bloom; then I'd take the blooms i picked off to her as if I was doing something good. She was so made she said but what could she do, I was only a baby.
My mother was always traveling all over the world and when I got older she would ask me to water her orchids when she was gone; I never did, unfortunately! Because she had to travel so much they didn't get the care they needed.
Well it was when I was up in Boca Raton that I saw a blue phalaenopsis at home depot and was just captivated by it. I bought it and to ensure I was caring for it properly I went searching online for all the information i could find on Phals, and then all orchids in general. I read forums and documents online; one day randomly my gf surprised me with a book on orchids which I read back to front. When i returned to jamaica I started noticing what was left of the orchids my mom had collected over the years a lot of which had died and the ones remaining were in poor shape with pests and fungus. I went to work putting what I had learned into effect; spraying, fertilizing, etc., and within a few months the orchids started to look healthier, new roots were emerging from the stems as if they just got a new breath of fresh air after years. Eventually blooms followed. Most of the orchids my mother had were Vandas, which I now new that's what they were called; I started to realize that these were the same orchids that my aunt had landscaping her yard as well. The blooms were breathtaking to me and i was in disbelief that these things had gone unnoticed by me for so many year. And so began my fixation and love for Vandas. Over time this passion spread to other orchid genus.

[SlipperGirl]

I got my first orchid from a big box store at the time the only orchid I new of was phals, so I got one, never thought I would have about 10 orchids a few months later Anyway it did not take long before the orchid started dieing so I bought a book when I got the book on the cover there was photos of different orchids, the one that got most of my attenion was the paph So I started to do more research on orchids after seeing all those pics of different orchids I was in love in them

[iammadeofdreams]

Once I give it a bit of thought, I guess the orchid bug sort of bit me years earlier than I thought. I just didn't start buying plants right away. Sometime around high school I started admiring orchids (mostly phals at first because I had done no reseach yet and thought all orchids looked similar to phals). However, I was intimidated by the idea of growing them so I started collecting orchid themed things: candles, little statues, prints, whatever I could find. Then about 4 years ago, my mom got me a white phal as a gift. To my amazement, it was the first plant to survive my care for more than a month. It did great for about 6 months, but a housefire put an early end to it's life. For some reason the death of that orchid left me pretty discouraged and I pretty much stuck to admiring them in stores until earlier this year. At Valentine's Day my mom caught me staring at the phals in the grocery store and she got one for me. I have so far added 5 more to my collection and the wishlist continues to grow.

I would say that I am definitely hooked on orchids for good this time.