My Orchids

The Background: I'm new to the whole thing, but I'm very proud of my Orchid. It's some sort of Phalaenopsis, a NO-ID Phal as they call it. My wife bought it at the store a year ago and... suffice it to say that it was generally considered a goner after it quit blooming. I set it out where all of my other plants go to die... by the mulch pile. I tripped over it one day several months later to find that the leaves were still green and healthy. So I bought some basic orchid supplies (Spaghnum moss and Special Orchid Mix -- looks like bark with charcoal and some kind of spongy material) and soon it was shooting up a new flower spike with two off shoots, all three covered in buds......... long story short, I took something that was only an impulse from ending up in the trash can and inadvertently ended up with a beautiful treasure. It's a good feeling. This orchid opened its first bud in July and is still blooming now in October.

The Event: My orchid actually has a brand new spike starting to shoot up.  This being my first orchid, I really wasn't sure what it was so I posted a picture on the forums at www.orchidgeeks.com. It's a great site for orchids - a very active, knowledgeable community. On it, I read that you can get cheap orchids from Lowe's Home Improvement if you buy plants that were never bought while in bloom. They set these poor little guys a-way back in the corner where the hoses evidently don't reach. As coincidence would have it, I needed a new supply line for our toilet. (The old supply line is "Flood Safe" which means that if flow exceeds 2.5 gpm then it shuts itself off. The only way to reset it is to take it off and put it back on. Anyway, our new water pump [I use "new" with the most negative of connotations. As in, "my new luggage that I got to buy because the airline lost mine."] is 1/6 of a horsepower more powerful which means that it now triggers my super flood safe fail-safe every time you... well... don't let it mellow. I tried to only open the water valve a little, but it makes the pump turn on and off while the tank fills up which I hear is bad for the pump.)

The Pictures:

1. All the supplies you need to repot an orchid. The small plant is my new Dendrobium Orchid that I bought for $4.49 (the same plant in bloom, though slightly larger, was priced at $24.49).

2. I'm filling the pot 1/4 full with shells (instead of rocks) then filling the rest with 1/2 orchid mix and 1/2 spag moss.

3. After soaking the mix and cleaning & trimming the roots of the orchid, I'm ready to put it in its new pot.

4. My newly potted Orchid alongside my Blooming Phalaenopsis Orchid.

Ad Nauseam: If I recall correctly, there is some species of orchid native to every part of the world. I'm interested in adding a SE North Carolina native orchid to by burgeoning collection soon -- I have no idea where to get one.