Phalaenopsis Orchid care, propagation, and rebloom

hi guys my name is sean i'm a house plant enthusiast from jakarta indonesia i have to care for different plant species propagate them and share my experience with you here on youtube so if you're internet kind of videos please do consider subscribing to my channel and send this video a like in today's video i'm going to talk about the orchid care propagation and rebloom uh first of all phalaenopsis orchids are one of the most uh grown cultivated orchids around the world and they have been selective br selectively bred and hybridized so that they're easy to grow they're forgiving and they will flower often so any plant that you will get in nurseries or supermarkets are probably going to be very easy to care for phalaenopsis orchids actually come in a variety of colors shapes and sizes so there's one for everybody there's no excuse for you not to get one so phalaenopsis orchids in nature are actually grown on trees so their roots will attach to the trees and the leaves will actually grow one way like like they open up towards the sun so it grows kind of upwards like that and this is really important for you to know when you're planting this plant when you're growing this plant is that you have to face the leaves to the direction of the sunlight if you face this the other way the planet is not going to get sunlight or proper amounts of sunlight at least and when they do that in nature it's also a defense mechanism because when you leaves are sideways when water gets on you the water will just trickle off and instead of pulling in the middle of exactly where the the leaves meet because these plants are very very prone to rot so let me quickly talk about the sunlight which is that they like medium to bright in direct light with a little bit of mooring direct sunlight would encourage them to grow faster but it's not required and if you put them in too bright of direct sunlight the leaves will burn and if you put them in too low of a light sometimes the leaf will just yellow up and fall off and the new leaves are just going to grow super slow for you it may not even flower for you at all in terms of watering what we discussed before is that this plant really needs to dry out really fast so when you're outdoors and indoors the care is very different i actually brought this plant in from indoors this plant lives in my nursery and i watered it i'm going to show how i water my all my nursery plants later but when i moved it indoors because it was flowering about a month ago i have to water it completely differently which i'm going to show you in a in a bit too so i kept this in a cash pod here and there's actually i'm not going to lift it or not because i only got one hand there's a little bit of water down here only like this level of water so that any water can be wicked up to the top however when you have lecka the top part sometimes tend to be a bit dry so i have this trusted bottle right here and i would sometimes miss it as you can see when orchids uh are thirsty you can actually tell from the roots their roots become the silvery uh color and this is actually i i read that it's a symbiotic relationship it's actually fungi that's lived with the roots so yeah when you spray this down it will turn into a darker green color and that's when you know that the roots are well fed so when kept indoors i don't try to get the leaves wet at all because there's no airflow here it may rot the plant so i just get the roots a little bit wet but then they need to dry out again very quickly they cannot be sitting in water so i just spray the top with a little bit of water and that's it and i do that every meal breakfast lunch dinner because i sit right here this is my seat we're all social distancing now so we're all sitting at opposite ends of the table oh and i forgot to mention that i actually add a little bit of fertilizer orchid fertilizer in here because orchids do need the feed in order for them to push out those blooms so just make sure you feed your orchid regularly but keep it diluted so do not over fertilize your orchids they do like to be frequently watered but they need a really quick drying out period so they have to dry within minutes so if you're outdoors of course i just host them down whenever i walk by it it's not a problem but when you're indoors do not get the leaves wet because they're very prone to bacteria and fungus and rot again and when you're indoors sometimes the leaves will stay wet for hours on end so keep that in mind they are heavy feeders you do need to fertilize your orchids in order for them to keep pushing out these beautiful leaves beautiful leathery green thicker leaves and to give you your flowers of course an orchid fertilizer is different from other fertilizers i'm going to show you that at the end of the video how i fertilize my orchids but yeah you do need to fertilize them and orchids are particularly pest free at least in my experience correct me if i'm wrong i didn't use to use any pesticide on my orchids and they're fine although lately i do put a little bit of pesticide into my fertilizer mix just in case just because i can so they're very very easy plants in that manner and in terms of fungus and rot as i mentioned before they are very successful to this i do add fungicide to my fertilizer spray as well so yeah orchids are really easy to care for as long as you follow the guidelines you know what they're liking their natural habitat and you try to replicate that in your home and the last key that i want to touch on is good airflow and i believe that it will help the plant if it's got really good airflow around the leaves and around the roots because they do take in some of the nutrients from the air as applified and airflow is going to help prevent rot and fungus on the plants and this particular plant again it's rebloom so i'm going to quickly show you how i do that so as you can see here this is actually the previous bloom spike and i just cut it off right here right uh above a note that was not used so the flower was actually above that and it started giving me uh this flower spike right here really beautiful it took like a month to completely unfurl very beautiful i took uh this plant in from my nursery about yeah about a month ago actually so it's been living in here it's completely fine with the transition indoors oh pretty and it's also given me a secondary spike that's from a completely different side of the leaves and this is going to give me four flower buds really beautiful so my phalaenopsis orchid lives on the shelf it's actually got two sides so it's getting light from this side of the shelf and also this side of the shelf and as you can see we have paranet up there so it's getting bright in direct light but some part of this plant here actually gets a little bit of direct sunlight in the afternoon because the sun is uh this way right now in december but that's going to change in six months time but it seems to tolerate a little bit of direct sunlight just fine as you can see i have many of these and these are actually supposed to be thrown away by my parents they just bought these for chinese new year i have three more over here so yeah i saved them i moved them into lecca just like guys it's very easy to move them and yeah they've been thriving here the leaves are growing like crazy so uh with phalaenopsis orchids the plant of the health that the health of the plant is not in the flower guys it's in the leaves and in the roots so when they have grown you know this is actually a new leaf if they keep growing leaves and the roots are growing they will get bigger and bigger and the flower will become more and more pronounced so just keep in mind when you're buying orchids do not look at the flowers but look at the leaf and the roots okay so as you can see there this plant actually can tolerate very very frequent or crazy watering but they do need to be dry out completely between watering very very quickly they need to dry out within minutes because they're very very prone to rot and bacteria and you also drown them so this is why we put them in lekka and or you can use horticulture horticultural charcoal or pine bark that's really thick and chunky they can also live in that so when you're visiting an orchid nursery you'll see these uh hard water hard water stains but this is actually usually fungicide so they leave a mark on the leaves but they do wash off after a while in the rain or you can actually wipe them off fairly easily so no worries about that and this one's actually putting out a new route here this is actually a route and also putting out a flower there you go nice yeah so i did leave the previous flower spike on as you can see this one is dried off and this one i'm not sure what happened to it i think this is bloom twice for me probably i just cut it off right here so again if you are encouraging a secondary spike you can leave the spike on and just keep these uh two nodes because these will either give you a keiki which is a baby orchid or it'll give you another secondary bloom coming out of this however if you cut it off at the base this will this plant will still give you another orc uh flowering from a different spike it will put out a whole new spike and i hear that if you do that the new spike will take a lot longer but it will give you bigger and showier flowers so yeah that's how you treat orchids after they orchid spikes after they have bloomed in the future i think i will just cut it off because in the past that's what i did i left it on because i don't mind it if it takes its own time as long as the blooms are bigger and more bustier here's actually a baby orchid this came from a keiki so orchids are propagated by offsets which is keikis or by sea so i'm going to show you a clip of what i shot before in the past of this planet when it was just born here we have a phalaenopsis orchid that's given me a cakey cake is basically another orchid that is grown instead of a flower on the flower spike how beautiful looks like a flying angel a flying fairy or flying bird however you want to interpret it so it's been like this for about a few months and the roots are getting longer and longer so what i'm gonna do today is i'm gonna liberate her and let her see if take that off yeah nice so she's gonna go into her own pot and grow into a beautiful uh orchid orchid lady so that is this plant now this is the update uh i believe this is probably about six months since i took it took it off the parent plant and it's just turning into its own plant it's really beautiful it's gonna take probably uh one to two years i believe before it starts flowering so here's how i water the orchids every day just kind of holds them down actually i do this whenever i pass by this area or especially if it's a sunny day i'll just hold it down make sure that it's thorough that it gets on the leaves the roots and anything in between and this is these are actually orchids too this is our orchid too it's super satisfying watering orchids is my favorite part of the day so yeah and i make sure to go around the other side and spray it from the other side but i'm going to do that right now here i'm going to show you how i mix my orchid fertilizer so first of all this is the fertilizer that i got it's not sponsored and there are many other brands i don't know why i have this this is just what i have happened to buy online in this pandemic it's got chinese words on it i'm not sure what words even made but orchids they require different sets of nutrients from your common house plants they have a lot of micronutrients that are a little bit different and geared towards uh encouraging to bloom and this is how i mix my orchid fertilizer i eyeball it that's it i'm i don't i'm not the kind of person to measure anything uh and i'm i don't know i'm just not that kind of person when i'm cooking when i'm mixing my potting mix i never ever measure um i believe that everything should be stress free and we should just use our common sense i always under fertilize just so you know fertilize frequently but in tiny amounts and i use actually a little bit of pesticide here this is the kura kron just a tiny bit you're supposed to use this in the evening so you don't burn your leaves but i've always used it in the morning because i'm too lazy um but neem oil you should never that's neem oil right there you should never use neem oil in the daytime because i've burned plants by using them in daylight and here's the fungicide here this is what gives them that residue after you water them at least it stays on the leaves and it looks like hard water stain i just pour a little bit on it and then voila as i spray this uh as you can see it becomes very very mixed up in there so i don't really even have to mix it anymore yeah and i only i know that i only need half a half a thing i have a sprayer because i don't have that many orchid okay and i'm just spraying them down feeding them that's it this is all you need to do i do this every week or so or if i remember sometimes i don't do it for a whole month if i'm busy they're very forgiving but orchids do respond very well to fertilizer they will grow better faster stronger they will flower more and i can definitely tell that because when i'm fertilizing i notice a significant change in in their growth this is a vanilla orchid yeah i'm going to go around and finish fertilizing my other orchids since i already have this in my hand bye oh i forgot an important point when you fertilize the orchids you do want to get the leaves and the roots wet that's where they absorb the nutrients but if you have any flowering flowers you don't want to get that wet with fertilizer and with pesticide you want to leave the flower alone all right so i hope that that was very clear that you guys are more confident in caring for your orchids and encouraging reblooms uh i hope that you guys are staying safe i'm at botanist on instagram if you wanna dm me or any questions regarding plant care and propagation i'll try my best to get back to you meanwhile do take care and stay safe i will see you in the next video bye

Channel: onlyplants

Views: 23,833

Rating: 4.9278631 out of 5

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Id: TP8CNn4pmaQ

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 29 2020