Friday, April 25, 2014

Unfinished business: Phalaenopsis NOID

Last August, i was angry at my one Phalaenopsis. It had been producing a flower spike, the first since I bought it in March 2009. And then something unclear happened, and the top of the spike, the part with the buds on it, just kind of disappeared. The most likely explanation is that I caught it in the shelf above it when I was taking it out to water, and just didn't notice I'd injured it.

Readers counseled me to wait, that it might still produce some new flower buds off the spike as long as I left it on the plant. I believed the readers, in that I figured they were probably correct insofar as Phalaenopsis owned by other people might do this, but I didn't believe anything like that would happen in this case. I've had basically no positive orchid-growing experiences previously, so why should there be one now?

But, there appear to be new buds developing on the decapitated flower spike, eight months later:


So . . . we'll see. It would be just like an orchid to produce another bud just to rub my face in it when some mysterious catastrophe happens to that one too.

The flowers weren't even that pretty, as I recall (a fairly plain solid pink-purple), so a successful bloom would be more of a symbolic victory than anything else anyway.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well according to what I've read and tried, what causes phals to produce a new inflorescence is exposing them to some slight cold. Cold that's not a killer though, like in autumn. Man, I know exactly how those bastards are supposed to be easy to grow and yet they always have their issues. Oh, you watered me too soon so I'm just going to rot all of my roots. Oh, I've got no reason to but I'm going to shed all of my flowers. Oh, I've already dropped all of my flowers, have produced new buds but just because you want me to I'm gonna dry them too. They're plain...mean.