Orchids Again, but Wrapped in Dog

You may remember my blog from last November, when I picked a sultry warm day and repotted every durn one of my orchids, spread 'em out on the front lawn and about kilt myself bending and stretching and fetching and washing and spraying.

Normally, you shouldn't have to repot an orchid more than once a year. But I had bugs. Lotsa bugs. Tiny white bugs aswarm in the medium and awful awful Boisduval scale and mealybugs around the base of the stem and regular goopy sticky scale all over the underside of the leaves. It was verging on horrible. By the time an orchid starts to look peaked from bug damage (mostly being sucked dry by scale), you had better jump to fix it. Mine were not yet looking peaked, but I wasn't going to wait for that. See, they talk to me and tell me when it's time to intervene.

Last November, I repotted most of my plants in mixed bark medium, and therein lay the problem. Bugs just love living in that stuff. I decided to knock every single plant out of its pot and take a hard look at the situation. Sure enough, the plants in bark all had bugs, and the plants in Aussie Gold, which has diatomaceous earth in it, were virtually bug-free. OK. I had ordered enough Gold to redo almost everybody, and I went for it. Thirty-two times. Sigh. There are thirty-two of them.

There followed three days of futzing around with orchids, capped by a washing and spraying extravaganza. I won't use anything stronger than pyrethrins, which is probably why I continue to have bugs. Fine. I'll continue to have bugs, and I won't croak young.

There was orchid medium dumped everywhere, hoses and bags and trays and pots...it was ridiculous. But the weather was glorious for it all--raining and warm--and nobody got sunburned, least of all me. I just sat out there in the rain soaked to the skin and dealt with it. Enjoyed myself, in a painful, back-breaking kind of way.

The sun finally broke through, but by then everyone was potted and taken back inside.

I think the hardest part of any job is cleaning up everything you've pulled out while doing it. Blaa. You want it to be over, and then there's cleanup.

Mether, I get very tired just watching you. You are never still, do you know that? You should nap more. Look at me. I nap all the time and I think everyone would agree I am more lovable than you.

Chet Baker, what kind of thing is that to say?

Forgive me, Mether. It's just that you have been diddling with your orchid plants for three days now and you have barely done anything with me. When will you be all done?

When the last plant is washed and sprayed and potted in sterile medium, Chet Baker, that's when I'll be done. But you know I love you more than all these orchids thrown together. Don't you?

Yes, Mether. And I also know that your readers find me much more lovable than orchids. I am the whole reason they put up with your plant stories. And I would add "hamster stories" to that.

Well, all right, Chet. You've got me there.

What's Blooming Now

Did everyone turn off their lights from 8:30-9:30 on Saturday? We did. We're pretty good at dealing without electricity, after this winter. If anyone's wondering, that's a vintage Poll Parrot clock on the wall, a second anniversary gift Bill and I gave each other. The mysterious black machine beneath the clock filters our water five times, ozonates, carbon polishes it, and, we hope, fills us with never-ending health and goodness. I couldn't live without Mr. Goodwater.

Turning the lights off made us notice how beautiful daffodils are by candlelight. So are clivias.


The Clivia miniata (Kafir lily) I've nurtured for three years has three huge bursts of orange, fragrant blossoms. This, for having left it bone-dry in a cold basement all winter. That's what it likes.

I love flower time. I really, really love flowers. Outside, there are crocuses and daffodils galore.


When we first moved here, there was a sad little straight line of fancy daffodils that ran right through the middle of the lawn. It had once lined a driveway that was no more, and it no longer made sense in the landscape. So we mowed around them for a few years, then dug them up out of the rock-hard soil and planted them in the soft compost of our new raised flower beds. This is just a fraction of the daffodils we now have.

The big dig was about 14 years ago. They have multiplied to the point that I dig up daffodil bulbs with everything I try to plant in those beds. I can bring them in by the armload and never notice I've cut them, there are so many bobbing and dancing in the cold spring wind. All that from just a few bulbs, transplanted to a place they can thrive and multiply. Plants just give and give and give.

Meanwhile, out in the greenhouse, everyone's going k-k-k-krazy.Look at the little red and yellow bells of Abutilon megapotamicum. All the gerania that were just leaves in my last post are blooming their heads off.

Inside the house, the orchids are winding up. Oh Lord, I love this time of year, when I get up every morning and peek down into their paired leaves to see if I can find a new bloom spike starting. Plants are blooming this spring that haven't bloomed for years. I think it's the massive repotting I did in November, that's what I think. I think it's the Aussie Gold medium I used. It's payback time. The diatomaceous earth in the Aussie Gold medium seems to have licked the mealybugs, and throwing out sick plants helped a lot. Not to mention the thorough washing and spraying they got in November, in that marathon of orchidaceous labor. With orchids, it's all about being willing to wait.

Psychopsis Mendenhall "Hildos" is about to unfurl another dancing flamenco lobster, its eighth since last June. Ahhh.

Here's Laeliocattleya " Firedance Patricia" about to haul off and give me some red flowers.
You can tell it's happy because the new growth off to the left side is so robust and full of buds.


The promise in those fat bronze buds...the anticipation of waiting for them to open...such fun. And then a few days go by and boom, they open.
But for now, the undisputed Queen of the Collection is a Brassaevola cross called "Morning Glory." I....love.....this.....plant.
The flowers are enormous, three inches or more across, and fragrant. OK, you had me at enormous, but fragrant? Almost seems too much to ask for. Now, pull back and look at the entire plant, which is a couple of feet across at this point.


That's what I'm talkin' about. A plant that is self-actualizing, blooming from every new growth point, practically leaping from its pot in exuberance. At last count, sixteen blossoms open at once. Stinkin' up the place.

These are the things that happen when plants are happy, when the lines of caring and communication are open between plant and caretaker. You feel like an orchid samurai, keeper of ancient secrets, axion of ability, but really, it's just this little magical thing that happens when you care enough to figure out how to do the right thing.

On Friday, I made my way back from my speaking engagement in Middletown by way of Columbus. There was to be a huge orchid show and sale, if the American Orchid Society and Central Ohio Orchid Society web sites were to be believed, running from Friday through Sunday at an airport hotel. I drove around in circles looking for the right Mariott, and when I finally found the entrance, I made my way inside the huge atrium where I teamed up with two equally confused women who'd driven down from Detroit, who, when I spotted them, had that look of the orchid fancier about them: smart, sharply dressed, well-tended. (I am a distinct anomaly). We wandered around asking custodians about it until someone told us which conference room might hold the show. Finally we found a room with a few orchids on a folding table, nothing more. It seems the web sites had misled us; setup was Friday, and the show actually opened Saturday morning. The vendors hadn't even arrived yet.

Oh.

The orchid ladies from Detroit, who'd driven three hours expressly to buy some new orchids, were a good deal more perturbed than I. I immediately took it as a cosmic smackdown, and actually felt relieved. Clearly, I don't need any more orchids than the 38 currently cramming my shelves, and the gods agree about that. I climbed back in the Exploder, kissed Chet Baker, and headed home to enjoy what I already have. Which, in truth, is way more than enough. A fact that will make itself clear next November, at the next repotting marathon.

It's not having what you want.
It's wanting what you've got.

Sheryl Crow, "Soak Up the Sun"

Repotting Orchids

There followed almost five hours of crouching, carrying, washing, spraying, potting and groaning. Anybody who says, "Oh, I stay away from orchids. They're so much work!" will no longer get a breezy dismissal from me. They are a LOT of work, especially when your collecting gene kicks in and you allow your little family to grow to 38 plants, none of which is getting any smaller as the years go by. And I am still on the steep part of the learning curve where orchids are concerned, still trying to figure out which potting medium, from sphagnum to bark to a fabulously expensive medium called Aussie Gold, works best for me. Naturally, it is the fabulously expensive medium called Aussie Gold.

Because, as their web site crows, "You cannot overwater Aussie Gold!"

Well, good. Because I try like hell to overwater my plants and sometimes succeed. Just ask Lazarus.

At the end of four hours, my front yard looked like this:
Everybody's in a pot, everybody's clean and sprayed and, we hope, deciding to grow new roots to replace the rotted ones, and their benevolent overlord has decided to go ahead and spring for Aussie Gold for everybody for the big repotting in two years. Another round for the whole bar!

Bark as a potting medium is comparatively inexpensive, and great if you have all kinds of time to devote to your orchids and you enjoy repotting once a year. But if you have a life that includes a lot of other things besides diddling with your orchids and repotting them at the first sign that their bark medium might be rotting and getting sludgy, Aussie Gold is the way to go. It's soil-free, made of ground-up rocks and diatomaceous earth among other good things, it doesn't deteriorate into oxygen-choking sludge the way bark does, and I noticed that there were NO BUGS in any of my plants potted in Aussie Gold. That was a startling revelation.

Diatomaceous earth, made from microscopic fossil diatoms that once floated in primeval oceans, has sharp silica edges in it and it kills bugs that try to wriggle through it. It's like writhing around in broken glass. That's my Science Chimp theory, and I'm sticking to it. Oddly enough, though the Aussie Gold web site mentions practically everything else about the benefits of diatomite, it omits this key point. It's murder on nematodes and mealybugs and whatever those little white things swarming in the medium might have been. I threw a handful of prophylactic Gold into each pot, and used pure Gold for my most precious plants.

The Psychopsis mendenhall "Hildos" which has been blooming since early June is STILL blooming, on its sixth successive flower, and I took a deep breath and repotted it too. You're not supposed to disturb an orchid in bud or bloom but at that point I had blood in my eye. And I'd heard that a good Psychopsis might throw blossoms off the same stalk for as long as seven years before sending up another one. With all care, I peeled its pot away from its roots, soaked it in rainwater, and gave it fresh medium. Hildos got pure Aussie Gold in its new pot.I'm so glad I did--the plant's pseudobulbs were alarmingly withered, and they've plumped up nicely since repotting. There appears to be no transplanting shock with this medium, since it retains so much water yet allows air in, too. Old Hildos needed help. A week plus later, it's hanging on to its flower and buds and looking better all the time. The happy flamenco lobster dude bobs and smiles. I smile back.

The aftermath--yuccky pots and piles of buggy medium. I cleaned it all up, even though my muscles were weeping by then.
Before carrying the plants back inside, I washed all their humidity trays. Bleh. The fifth hour of labor ticked by.

The whole time, I carried visions in my head of the ultimate reward for the work.
Come April and May, I hope for a shower of blossoms like last year's.
Yes, orchids are a ton of work, but they say thank you so nicely.

And now I leave for Guyana, having spent the last week paring my suitcase down to 34 pounds, my optics backpack to 16. I'm hoping to use the marvels of Mac technology to teleconference with Bill, the kids and Baker at least once while I'm gone. It's like something out of the Jetsons, to open your computer, activate i-Chat, and not only talk to but SEE your husband and babies there on your screen, for free. Cross your fingers for me that we're able to make it work. Bill has to remember to activate iChat every day...I think I'll put Phoebe on that detail.

I've been cooking and storing food like a crazy squirrel in fall: brisket, chicken pot pie, chicken chili, leaving love sealed in Tupperware.

Don't worry. The BlogSquirrel has cooked for you, too.

Mission Creep in the Orchid Room

It all started innocently enough. I took a hard look at one of my orchids, which seemed to be dying again. An orchid in my house can visibly die, dwindling down to one or two withered leaves, and at that point any normal person would simply throw it out. I respond by pulling it out of the pot and looking at its roots, to see if there's any chance I can salvage the plant. So I took said orchid (one I call Lazarus, because it did this before, three years ago), and dumped it out on the front lawn. The potting medium (bark and charcoal) was dried out on top and soggy toward the bottom of the pot, and all but a couple of the orchid's roots were dead. This is Lazarus, in better days:Here's the thing with orchids. Oxygen is even more important than water to them. That's why orchid potting medium seems so coarse and dry. You pot this thing up in chunks of bark and your natural instinct is to water it a LOT because the medium doesn't hold any water. But that is exactly the point. Orchids need to dry out between waterings, or their roots rot. And after 15 years of keeping orchids, I am still watering them too much.

Worse than that, the medium was absolutely seething with tiny white insects, or maybe they weren't insects. The Science Chimp did not know what they were, but she knew they were bad news. Sometimes her taxonomic curiosity fails her and she just wants to get rid of the damn things.

So I sighed and immersed the infested plant in tepid water, taking all the medium off the roots, and got out my potting medium and a new clean pot and sprayed the plant, roots and all, with pyrethrins and let it dry in the sun before potting it up again.

And it occurred to me that if Lazarus was suffering so, well then the five or so plants next to Lazarus likely were, too.

And it was a warm day, really nice and sunny, and it was already November, and when would I get this kind of weather again and maybe I'd just take a peek at Lazarus' neighbors to see if they had bugs and were miserable too. So I carried four more plants out onto the lawn and dumped them out and yep, there were tiny white bugs crawling through their rotten soggy medium too so I sighed and immersed them and got out some more fresh potting medium and sprayed the plants with pyrethrins and left them to dry on the lawn while I went and dug up some more pots which then had to be washed in hot soapy water.

While those plants were drying I went back inside and took a hard look at the dozen or more plants on the other bureau in the bedroom and hmmmm. They didn't look so hot, either, and it was a warm day and it was already November and when would I get a day like this again so I hauled them out and dumped them out on the lawn, too. And before you know it my entire orchid collection was out on the lawn, roots up, and it was overload, and it wasn't cute.I began to sing loudly, to take my mind off the abyss, the pit of hell into which I now leapt.

Mama said there'd be days like this
There's be days like this my mama said
Ai yi yi yi yi yi yi...

Next: Zick leaps in and finds redemption in the mess.