RECYCLING ORCHIDS

Orchids. Good things to give and to receive. Sadly most orchids have their all-too-brief moments of glory and then end up in the bin. It need not be like this. First, learn how to extend the life of the orchid you have been given and then learn how to persuade it to flower again - it won't do this immediately but, if you treat it kindly, it will come back again. Note: I am not an expert. I'm simply sharing what has been my experience with these lovely plants. All orchids illustrated here are of the phalaenopsis family - the kind you are most likely to see in a supermarket.

I bought this orchid from Waitrose. It had been hanging around for far too long and it had been marked down to £8.00 - that's about half the usual price. I took it home and fed it. Yes, they need to be fed. Not just watered - although people have so many strange ideas about orchids that some even believe they don't need to be watered. Oh yes they do. And they need to be fed.

I bought this marked down sad looking plant some four months ago and it has been in flower all that time. It has developed more flower buds and they have blossomed. Look at it.

Slightly over-exposed due to bright sunlight this morning. Admit, though, that it is a nice looking flower.

I'll come to the matter of what to use when feeding later.

Now, to recycling; how to keep them alive until they are ready to flower again. You'll know when the flowering period is over. One by one the blooms wither and drop. It will happen to the above - but not for a while; I'm hoping for six months of colour. When you are left with a blossomless spike (that's what they call the stem upon which the blooms grow) you take a sharp knife (a Stanley knife is good or a scalpel) and cut off the stem quite low down, just above a 'node'. A node is a lumpy bud-like thing of which there will be many running up the spike up to where the blossoms have been. I like to make an angled cut as you use when pruning ordinary garden plants. 

Then you put the plant into your 'nursery'. This is just a flat plastic bowl, preferably rectangular, with those little clay spheres (sold as 'Hydroleca') that absorb moisture, on the bottom - to about one inch in depth.  Here your (presently) dormant orchid goes until it gets interested in blooming again. I use is a nice copper cooking dish for which I have no other use at all. Here it is with several orchids that are being looked after until they have something to show.

I keep my nursery in the living room, slightly concealed behind a sofa but fairly close to a window; these plants do need light, not glaring full sun but ... light. I have a rectangular plastic bowl that I use for watering and feeding.

I do this outside, because it can be messy. Into the plastic bowl I put 2 litres of rainwater. I have an old 2l mineral water bottle and I also have rainwater butts. When my nursery plants need watering (just lift the pots and if they feel light then it's time) I just stand them in the water and leave them there for a few hours. then I return them to their indoor home. I slosh some rainwater into the copper dish - enough to moisten the clay and that's it. If I'm in a hurry I use a turkey baster to suck up the water and squirt it on the top of the pots.

Spring and Summer are the times when you can replace watering with feeding. You do both at the same time. Feed with what? I use a convenient little pack of concentrated nutrition sold under the name 'Orchid Focus' which provides three little bottles of feed. One is labelled 'Grow' and I use that for the nursery plants - just one teaspoonful into the 2 litres of rainwater. Stand the pots in the container and either wait a few hours or give them the turkey baster treatment. When they're soaked put them back in the nursery bowl. Weekly feeding will get your dormant plants moving, albeit slowly. Keep on with this treatment until a spike emerges and then wait as it grows until buds form. Then you change the feed to Orchid Focus 'Bloom'.

At this point you will inevitably find that you have some plants just quietly waiting for the urge to burgeon (note that, it's quite nice to say) and some starting to bud up. What I do is put each pot of budding orchid into a cache-pot, mix up a separate Feed mixture, pour it into the cache-pot (not too much, leave room for the pot ) and then stand the pot in there so it can take a long, long feed. The turkey baster comes in handy here. After an hour or so remove the pot, jettison the feed (mine goes to the geraniums), swill out the cache-pot, add some Hydroleca, moisten it and put the pot back in the cache-pot. Put on a window sill or on a table close to a window, where there is moderate sunshine - and wait patiently.

In the Orchid Focus kit there is also a bottle of something called 'Ultra' which, it says, will 'improve the health and performance of potted orchids'. I use it sometimes. You can add it to the Grow' and 'Bloom' solutions and, well, it hasn't done any harm so far.

To find out more on these products go to www.focus-on-plants.com

Now some examples of recycled phalaenopses that I made earlier:

This one is my first. It's a bit stunted but it has good colour and looks set to last another few weeks at the very least:

This one grew a good long spike but with only a few buds. It has made a lovely flowering group and, who knows, it may develop other spikes and flowers. There are six more buds to go so hopes are high.

And here is the best result so far; as with the two above, it was once a 'used up' orchid, and would probably have been binned. Now see what can happen if you work at it. Good luck with your orchids!