Anybody grow orchids?

beefy

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Dawn i have an orchid that looks like your degarmoara except it blooms yellow and doenst have all that pink in it. it had fatter leaves than yours. very succulent looking leaves. it blooms in the middle of winter (in south georgia) and it has a very sweet smell. do you know what it is. i was thinking maybe a laelia
 

Dawn419

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Thanks Carri and Chicken_Boy!

I'm glad Skip was into them because they were one plant that I never even considered growing.

beefy,

Not sure what yours could be but when Skip gets back from town I'll see if he knows what it might be. He's the orchid pro around here...I'm just the lovely assistant! :lol:

Dawn
 

patandchickens

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beefy said:
Dawn i have an orchid that looks like your degarmoara except it blooms yellow and doenst have all that pink in it. it had fatter leaves than yours. very succulent looking leaves. it blooms in the middle of winter (in south georgia) and it has a very sweet smell. do you know what it is. i was thinking maybe a laelia
There are yellow odontoglossums that would look rather like that, and some are well scented, so I think that would be my first guess.

I dunno as there are actually any yellow Laelias (?). There are yellow Laeliocattleyas but both they and proper Laelias look rather different from the photo on the previous page (they both have a prominent, somewhat tube- or funnel-shaped 'lip' formed from the enlarged lowermost petal.

There may also be slender-petalled, clear-yellow Miltonias these days, Idunno, they're always coming up with new things and most of my orchid knowledge is sort of frozen in time at a 1983 level when I went off to college and didn't have to deal with all my parents' @%^*$& orchids any more (carrying outside, carrying inside at the end of summer, watering, onerwatering, underwatering, getting yelled at for miswatering, picking scale and mealybugs offa, etc - you will note that I do not grow orchids myself after all that :p)

Pat
 

doc_gonzo

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beefy,

most orchids with 2 parents of different genera usually marry up the names of each genera like cattleya + epidendrum = an epicattleya or miltonia + brassia = miltassia.

breeders have pushed the limits of orchid breeding and now there are orchids with 3 and 4 parents ( through several generations of course) "ara" is a suffix that is added to the breeders name or name of someone close to the breeder. so aliceara, and degormoara, among many others have 3 or more parents.

to complicate things even further, there are other suffixes depending on the mix of parents. the degormoara you compared your bloom to has miltonia, brassia, and oncidium in it's parentage. yours probably has a different grex name (thats the 'winter wonderland') meaning that parents of the same genera but different grex were used in breeding. hold on to your hat 'cause i'm not done confusing you yet!

orchids are monocots while most garden plants are dicots, meaning that they have a "food" package included in the seed that will help germinate the seed. monocots have no food package, orchids have 100,000's of seeds in each bloom pod, and the seeds are like dust.

when the seed pod breaks open they are carried on the wind to come to rest in the crooks of tree branches and the like. once the seeds come to rest they rely on michorhizal fungi to convert detritus into sugars that the seed needs to germinate.

in the lab of a breeder the fungi is replaced with special concoctions of sugars and agar and under sterile conditions the seeds are "flasked" and hopefully coaxed into growing. the breeder ends up with thousands of plants but they all look a little different.

they then select a very few blooms that have all the traits that they were looking for in the initial cross, and basically destroy those plants and harvest the meristem. once they have the meristem cells they can make millions of identical clones. dawn briefly explained meristem cloning earlier in this thread, so i won't go into that in more detail unless you ask (i can prattle on about orchids for more pages than you want to read).

i have tried to put this little mini lecture in laymans terms as much as possible. if you have more specific questions fire away. best case scenario if i could see a picture of your bloom, i could pin it down a little closer.

phew, i'm wore out!

cheers

doc
 

beefy

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this is a bad picture of my orchid b/c my camera phone isnt very good. it was taken i believe around christmas. the blooms were fairly shortlived but probably due to my naivete'. could have gotten chilled by the window or i may have messed up by watering while blooming. the yellow flowers soon were covered in a blackish dust or mold. i had one bloom that came on after all these faded and it has persisted, though its a pale yellow.
1121071911b-1.jpg


i also have a dendrobium that looks sickly and i'm not sure why. most of the leaves fell off. and flowers aborted right after it was given to me.

and i have a phaelanopsis that is a piece of cake but it hasnt bloomed in a while. it bloomed in november or 2006.
 

doc_gonzo

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beefy,

that thing has eppicat all over it! the tubular lip is a dead giveaway although there could be a little layleyia in the wood pile. don't be too concerened about the dendro a lot of them are descidious, they will drop leaves in the winter. dendros are a little frustrating because of this trait, a pot full of naked stalks (pseudobulbs) and killer blooms once or twice a year. don't cut anything back as the pseudobulbs store energy for the rest of the plant. give the phal a bit more filtered light slowly and a temp drop of 30 deg between day and night. every time the phal puts on a new set of leaves it has the potential to bloom, if conditions improve it could throw 2 or 3 spikes.

cheers

doc

ps nice multiple blooms and a great spread on the plant, keep up the good growing!
 

Seismic Wonder2

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I've had lots, killed most.

The only one I ever got to bloom twice ON MY OWN was a big white cattleya. I even polinated it and it produced a pod!

It took a month or so for me to realize I had no idea how to propogate catty keki. It did it's thing then the whole plant died.
I switched to growing weeds.
 
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