Watering Day and other musings.

Me, organizing my Ikea greenhouse

Today was a good day to water some of my orchids.  I have eight orchids that are growing in spaghnum moss which require a more diligent watering schedule than my orchids that I have growing in orchid bark mix.  With us running the wood stove in the basement for supplemental heat, the air is a bit more dry than normal.  With my Phals and other orchids that are in the orchid bark mix, I try to water once every two weeks whereas the ones in spaghnum, I'm generally having to water once a week.  

While the orchids were in their one hour water soak, I took the opportunity to straighten up my Ikea greenhouse that I have in my office.  Right now, I can only fit five small orchids in it, so I'm looking at other "terrarirum" like environments to house more orchids with better humidity control.  One of the things I knew I needed to improve was air circulation inside the greenhouse.  I had a little fan inside, but despite being plugged in (can run without being plugged in), it would cut off after a certain time and that wasn't very ideal in the grand scheme of things.  Its a perfect little fan for your desk to move air (which is what I got it for back when I worked in the office).  I remembered I had a CPU style fan that plugged directly into an outlet that I had purchased back when I was aging cheddar in the wine cooler downstairs.  It took a bit to find it, since things have been in a constant state of flux downstairs with Josh's office and going through boxes of stuff and sorting/getting rid of things. Josh found the fan and I set to getting it setup in my little greenhouse.  In my Ikea greenhouse, I have 2 grow lights on the "roof" as well as a heating mat and temperature regulator probe. 

The cords for those were "haphazard" at best so I feel a bit better with those being all nice and neat and routed properly.  The addition of the heating mat helps keep the interior of the greenhouse at a constant temperature that is ideal for growing smaller plants.  I have all the rest of my more established orchids out in the open either in my office or another room.  With the constant temperature flux during the cooler months, with the use of the wood stove and keeping my office door (or the other room door) closed at night, its actually ideal to give the orchids the down time so they can start sending out new stems/stakes and developing blooms.

Two of my keikis

Speaking of the orchids that are out in the open in my office, there are three of my Phalaenopsis orchids that have keikis on them.  I have six keikis across three of those plants.  What is a keiki?  Keiki means "child" in Hawaiian.  In horticulture though it is a baby plant that is asexually produced.  They are very common with Dendrobriums, Epidendriums and Phalaenopsis orchids.  On my Phalaenopsis orchids, at some of the nodes, new growth developed at the node and it started producing its own roots and leaves.  I think I have one that actually has a flower spike growing out of it!!  The rule of thumb I've seen/heard/read is that you don't want to cut the keikis away from the mother plant until it has three roots that are at least three inches long and has three leaves.  So the 3x3x3 rule. 

 
I would say that about half of my keikis are getting close to meeting the three inch root rule so I'll have more Phalaenopsis orchids soon.  It's been really neat to see the process of how the keikis have developed.  I didn't make note of when the keikis started growing but if I had to hazard a guess, its been somewhere around a year maybe.  Almost all of my Phals haven't been in bloom for about that long, mostly because the plant is putting that energy into developing the baby orchid.  If you look at my Orchid inventory spreadsheet (https://sites.google.com/view/orchidjourney/orchids/orchid-collection), only two of the Phals have a bloom record.  That inventory spreadsheet was created just recently so moving forward, there will better documentation on bloom times and more.  I really wish I had ID's on my Phals, but 99% of the time, if you get a Phalaenopsis from the grocery store or home improvement store, they won't have any identification on them, just some really poor care instructions.  Don't water your orchids with ice please!

My shelves and plants

I have a feeling it's going to be a while before any of my orchids are back in bloom.  I have noted some new flower spikes on some of my Phalaenopsis orchids and some new growth on my Zygopetalum, but I don't expect to see buds develop for a couple of months.  When they do start to bud, I'll definitely keep you posted!

I have two short bookcases/shelves I picked up off of FB marketplace stacked on top of the other in the corner of my office (its the brown thing behind me in the image at the top of this post). 
Recently I had gone through the books on those shelves and boxed a bunch of my old school textbooks to donate so I had some extra space to space out my plants some more.  I mean, my idea of being a paramedic and getting back into the fire service again is pretty much only a dream at this point.  While I enjoyed my days as an EMT and a firefighter, I really do like my sleep and I'm probably not physically able to do a lot of it anymore without suffering consequences. 

I think I was holding onto those books as memories of those days, but since they weren't really serving a purpose, it was time for them to go.  With all that being said though, I decided to keep my Essentials of Firefighting book as firefighting was my first love.  It's nestled in with my Physicians Desk Reference of Herbal Medicines and my rather small collection of Foxfire books (books 1-4).

I'm the tallest one in the picture.  This was my group who went in for interior firefighting that day.  This was my first time ever going into a fire.

So back to the shelves.  One thing I haven't mentioned is I have a couple of terrariums that I started last year consisting of materials found up at the farm.  What started as a cute mossarium with several types of moss, some small ferns and running cedar has turned into this massive collection of life.  I'm actually really proud of these mossariums/terrariums and seeing all the things that have come up from the soil from the farm.  There are several different types of mosses as well as a few plants I have no idea what they are.  I'll save talking about those for another post. 

My mossariums and light meter

I had those on the shelf directly below the top where my orchids were.  By freeing up a shelf of books/condensing things down, I decided to move those down another shelf and use the shelf they were on for more focused light on plants.  I have some grow lights in my cart that I'll order so that light can be distributed evenly across the shelves.  My goal is to have all of my orchids in one place and the lighting much neater than what it currently is.  Sidenote:  I really hate the way our house is positioned as the natural lighting is horrendous so I have to supplement with artificial lights.

My new orchid shelf with my jars of string of turtles and other plants under glass domes

A cutting from my string of turtles and a luck dragon

If you've made it this far, I appreciate you reading my blog posts.  Please check back often as I plan to post more in the future!