Orchid update

I have been collecting orchids since – I think - 2004. My first plant was a Saint Valentine’s present from my friend. The flowers were mainly white with purplish dots in the middle. The decorative pot it came in was white too, with a similar purplish motive on it.

That first plant died a long time ago, after flowering several times. I still have the pot though and today it holds another orchid plant that I’ve bought or received in recent years. In total about a dozen plants have come, stayed and gone. Today six remain and only one of them is blooming. I bought it approximately two months ago when most of the flowers were still tiny buds, waiting to burst open. Right now it’s sitting in all its glory on my Japanese cabinet in the living room, where I can see it when I’m working on my computer or when I’m watching TV. I hope the flowers will last well into the New Year and at least till Valentine’s Day when my friend will probably surprise me with a new specimen.

My current orchid family.
The one in the centre sits in the pot of the very first orchid plant
that my friend bought me in 2004.

The five other plants are sitting on the sill of the kitchen window. Only one of them has actually produced flowers since the summer of 2010 when I lost three plants due to the extremely hot temperatures. Orchids being exotic plants, you would expect them to thrive in warm weather conditions. It wasn’t the heat that killed them though but the lack of daylight. For almost two weeks I kept the shutters closed, in an attempt to keep the heat out. It worked, partially, but it also had a fatal impact on the orchids. The leaves turned all yellow and brown and one by one tumbled to the floor.

This spring, during the move, the remaining plants took another bashing. In the old apartment they had been living in the second bedroom in summer, enjoying a north-westerly exposure, far away from the burning hot summer sun. In winter they sat on the kitchen window sill, taking in as much as possible of the cold winter light.

Last October I moved them to the kitchen. I also started adding some special orchid fertilizer to their weekly drinking water. I got really upset when the only changes I saw were changes for the worse. But then, two weeks ago, all of a sudden, I saw these green ‘sprouts’ appearing on all five plants. At first I thought it were new roots growing out of the plant. In fact, in three out of the five plants they were roots. However, the two other orchid plants are clearly producing new flowers.

In the new apartment, the second bedroom window doesn’t have a sill, because it’s a glass door opening onto a tiny balcony. The exposure is right, but there is no place to put the orchids. Until recently I therefore kept them on a shelf that was left by the previous tenant and that looked perfect for that purpose. However, the plants didn’t get any direct sun light and by September – after hardly six months in their new home – you could see that they were suffering, despite the loving care I was giving them.

I'm not a botanist, but I'm pretty sure the long green bud on the left is a root;
the small one on the right is a flower.

It’s been so long since they have had flowers that I can’t remember what colour they are. I can’t wait to find out whether they will be yellow, white, purple or pink! I had been hoping to see the orchids in full bloom by Christmas, because that’s what it was like in the past. But they still have a long way to go … I’ll keep up updated on their progress!