hi everyone it's marianne and welcome to my wasteless life
in this video i'm going to share with you how i got my orchid plants to successfully reboom
thank you so much for joining me today
and if you are new this is my wasteless life
where i take you along my plant and sustainable lifestyle journey
and share with you some of my tips and tricks along the way
and i'm excited for today's video because i get to show off my orchid plants
i love orchids especially their flowers i grew up with orchids
they remind me so much of my childhood growing up in southeast asia
but always been intimidated by them because
i always had an impression that they were very hard to take care of
and we often see these plants at the clearance section at garden centers
so it's very easy to get an impression that these plants are finicky and very hard to take care of
but now that i have taken care a couple of them were actually i have three of them here right now
and i do find them relatively easy to take care of and not that hard to get to rebloom
as i've successfully rebloomed all of these three plants
so each of these orchid plants are in different stages of growth
and each have their own stories that i want to share with you
and i also want to share with you the steps that i took to get them to rebloom
and mind you i'm not an expert at orchids at all compared to my houseplants
i know very little about orchids
so this is all just based on my experience
so take it with a grain of salt it might work for you it might not
but for me who is the novice and taking care of orchid plants did
have relatively good success in re-blooming them
so i think the steps that i took might also work for you
so out of these three plants this one is probably the oldest
honestly don't even know what is the color of the bloom of this orchid
because i for as long as i can remember it's just the foliage on this one and we have this for like
i'm i can't even say i'm pretty sure at least three years this orchid plant
is with us and for those three years
i've never really took care of this orchid plant this is not this doesn't belong to me
but this year when i started taking care of these two plants i started paying attention this one too
and this is the first year that it grew a new spike over here and i'm really excited about that
and with this one this is a plant that i got off the clearance sections at lowe's
and again i didn't know what color of flowers it would
come out with but this one i got like i think around the summer of last year
and this one also didn't have any flowers already since i got it off the clearance section
it did have a couple of spikes that eventually dried out
so when i got this it has two spikes of its own already
which i thought i will be able to get to re-bloom from those spikes but those spikes dried out
so this one is a new growth and it has now bloomed about three flowers and it has a bud on the way
and this one we got probably last thanksgiving
it has white flowers and it has probably about six blooms already
and those blooms lasted for quite a long time it lasted maybe up until the end of january
but this flowers are actually new blooms
so this one did come with the original
blooms that it has when we bought it from the grocery store these two are brand new
and actually a lot larger than the blooms it originally came in
so not only this one continued to grow flowers
even though the old ones have died out it's now starting to have new growth points here and here
i'm going to show you close-ups and i'm going to tell you a little bit
how i was able to get them to push out new growth
so what i know about orchids is that they're epiphytic
plants normally they attach on trees they do not grow on soil
so they don't really get watered very often
so with that in mind that's how i schedule watering for my orchids
i don't water them very frequently in many of the instructions that come
with the plants when you buy them
they say you water it once a week or put an ice cube on it once a week
i never do the ice cube trick though i understand
why they say put an ice cube i kind of understand the idea behind it
because to get your orchids to bloom they need
actually lower temperatures not higher temperatures in order to bloom
and i guess the ice melting
on the roots of the orchids kind of triggers the plant to say hey it's blooming season
when maybe it's not blooming season yet for them so but i never did the ice cube trick
i probably water this once or twice a month
so for this one this is in the terracotta pot i just give it a thorough soaking
and maybe leave a little bit of water in the saucer this is on but that's pretty much it
and with this one since this one's in a cache pot i put
water in it and i kind of like treat it like one of my plants is semi-hydroponics
but i don't let it sit in water for too long maybe after a day
i throw out any excess water that might be left in this cache pot
with this one this one is quite a different situation
because this one has leca at the bottom and it has an orchid bark mix at the top
and this doesn't have a drainage hole so when i'm
watering this i'm just making sure the water fills up to the level of the leca
maybe just a little bit underneath
it and then i just let the water wick up to the orchid bark to the roots of the orchid
whenever it needs water so that way also not over watering this one as well
and so far it has been doing well and they say one way to tell if your orchids need watering is
if the roots that are showing
are not green anymore they have become very silvery or become very white
that's when you know that they need watering so sometimes i do follow that rule
but normally i just make sure that i'm not over watering this
and just water them maybe once or twice a month
and some people say orchids shouldn't be repotted
in a terracotta pot or in something that is enclosed or dark
because the roots also has the ability to photosynthesize
but so far this one is doing okay so i think it's fine
but if you're really concerned they say you want to pot up your orchids in a pot that
light and air can go through
so when you buy an orchid pot it looks like a transparent net pot it's made of plastic
it has lots of holes on the sides
not just at the bottom for drainage so that's for proper aeration and also for light to go through
but again so far like i said my orchids have been doing well so
far in the containers or pots that they're in
and orchids are very susceptible to root rot that's why i'm very careful with watering
and if you got a clearance orchid i would make sure to check the root system
and cut out any rotting roots that you will find
and a rotting root in an orchid is pretty much any plant that experiencing root rot
the roots will be very brown and very mushy that will easily fall off the roots of the orchid plant
and even if you're left with nothing that is okay the orchids grow its roots pretty quickly
as i've noticed with all of three of my orchid plants so
you don't have to worry about it not growing roots
or not having roots for a long time
and since the foliage of the orchids plants is very large
i make sure to clean the foliage of it as well
so that it has the ability to photosynthesize at the maximum level
and how did i get them to rebloom honestly so for
me the number one trick that work is using an orchid spray
so in previous videos i featured the miracle grow orchid plant spray you could use that
one that is very easy to find and very cheap
but after i ran out of that one i just started making my own foliage spray for my orchid plants
i upcycled the orchid plant food bottle that it came in originally with a miracle gro
and i started just using superthrive i would put a drop in here and i would just spray the plants
i usually concentrate the spraying on the leaves
and on the roots i used to also spray it on the flowers
but i watched a video i think it's probably miss orchid girl too
that says that i shouldn't be spraying the flowers itself
so i've just been concentrating the spraying on the roots and on the foliage
i think the reason that the orchid plant mist did work
in helping re-bloom the orchids is because it does contain nutrients
it does contain a little bit of fertilizer in it and unlike
most of our house plants where we have to wait for our house plants
to start pushing out new growth
before we start fertilizing them so with orchids is kind of the opposite
if you want to get them to re-bloom you want them to go a new spike
you have to start fertilizing them
but i didn't really actually fertilize the plants until they started blooming
so i think the orchid plant mist alone
is a good enough fertilizer to trigger them to grow new spikes
but it also has to do with the timing when i started spraying my orchids with orchid plant mist
it was during the fall to early winter season
which is also around the time that orchids would naturally produce their blooms
so their dormancy period after they bloom usually is around six to nine months
and they usually start
producing blooms from late winter to early spring so that's why i'm seeing these blooms right now
and why this one still continues to bloom is because this period is their blooming season
and since it is their blooming season aside from the orchid spray i am also fertilizing them
this one is also just from miracle gro it's an orchid plant food but
this orchid plant food is still higher on nitrogen than phosphorus and potassium
so if you have fertilizer for your house plants you can probably get away using that one
but i would suggest getting a fertilizer that is specific for orchids if your goal is to
get them to re-bloom
and this one i only have to use a quarter teaspoon per gallon of water
and that's what i use to fertilize my plants
and i fertilize them when i water them which is like once or twice a month nowadays
and almost on a daily basis i would spray
the plants so this is the only plants that i probably mist every day is my orchid plants
and for this one how i got it to have two new growth points as using this keiki cloning paste
so i used a keiki cloning paste to get it to produce two new growth points
and it took maybe about two weeks to three weeks since
i put the paste for it to start shooting out these two new growth points
and i could demonstrate with this one so i'm gonna demonstrate with this one
how i did it it's pretty easy
you just have to be very careful about it especially if you're doing it the first time
again i don't know the names of the parts of the orchids
but if this was a house plant this would be a node
it might be called a node it might be called something else
so the note over here it has a flap
that is covering it so what you're going to do is to peel back that node very carefully
and it would reveal kind of like a grow point
and you kind of know once you pull it back you will see a very fresh green
dot or spot over there so that's what you want to see
and so taking the keiki cloning paste just get a healthy amount of it using a cotton bud
apply it on that exposed node and that's pretty much it and you will wait
two to three weeks it will start pushing out a new growth point
which is going to be exciting
but one thing that i forgot to mention orchids are tropical plants
so of course they do need bright indirect light
but too much light could also burn the leaves and the flowers
so you want to give it like a happy medium they're definitely not low light plants
they can be low light if you don't want them to bloom
or if it doesn't have flowers they could survive in low light
like this one has been in a low light situation for the longest time
which i think is also the reason why it didn't produce a spike up until now
when it comes to humidity they are tropical plants so they would appreciate
some level of humidity between 40 to 60 percent
and that's how i take care of my orchid plants promise
you they're not as intimidating as they may seem
they're actually very fun and very easy to take care of
they're kind of like my favorite house plants to take care of right now
and i might get some more orchids to be honest
since i'm having so much success with this three
like i said the dormancy period is six to nine months so it might
actually take a long time before you can get your orchids to bloom
especially if you got one off clearance that doesn't have
any blooms right now and with this one it's like years
years before it produced a new spike and
granted it's because i started paying attention to it again this year
but it did take quite a while to also produce this new spike
and with this one it was this one's a little bit gratifying because i did buy this with full blooms
and so this one i'm kind of like a little bit more
experienced with orchids by the time i got this this one
i'm hoping to successfully rebloom throughout the year
i don't think that would happen but we would see
i mean some people have done it they get their orchids to
blow year around so i'm gonna see if i'll be able to do it with this one
but yeah so hopefully that helped anyone who is
new to orchids or looking into getting into orchids
i promise you get one don't buy the expensive ones yet because i know they can get pricey
get one off clearance or get one from a store that sells them for very cheap like this one
i got in full bloom not clearance for like 15 at the grocery store
i say go for it try it out i'm pretty sure you would like it as well
but if you've been taking care of orchids for a
while if you have any tips for me let me know down in the comments
i would love to hear them
but yeah thank you so much for watching
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take care of yourself and each other
and have a plantiful day bye