Orchid watering has its finer points: understanding orchid watering methods in one article

When it comes to watering orchids, "see dry, see wet" is a fairly common phrase.

Brother Jing understands it literally as follows: when the environment inside the pot is dry (see dry), water it, and water until it is thoroughly soaked (see wet). He once thought he had grasped the true essence of watering.

It is just that the orchids he grows have always been half-dead, which shows that in practice he should temporarily refrain from commenting on whether he has attained the truth of orchid growing.

In a casual chat in the past, an old stubborn-donkey orchid hobbyist from Sichuan once said: "see dry, see wet" should be "interval dry, interval wet."

At the time he did not take it seriously, but habitually remembered it.

In past summers, Jingbo always watered on a fixed schedule, generally once every three days, and the orchids grew fairly well.

This year the climate changed greatly. Entering summer, Jingbo still insisted on watering once every three days, and the orchids performed unevenly:

Most orchid leaves were scorched yellow with severely withered tips; a few large pots accumulated moisture that would not dissipate, and the damp gloom would not clear; a very few pots had just the right environment inside and were growing beautifully.

The biggest risk of accumulated moisture is rot. To prevent rot, Jingbo decided to lengthen the watering interval for Yu Hudie grown in large pots, and the result was ideal: the leaves went from dry and rough to oily and moist.

This also overturned a misconception in Jingbo's mind: if orchids are to be elegant, the higher the humidity the better.

The fact is otherwise: with proper dryness and wetness, orchids grow at their most glossy and moist.

Now let us talk about the lesson of orchid leaves generally turning scorched yellow.

In past years with normal climate, new shoots had mostly rooted by early summer, and even if the temperature was very high, the orchid shoots were supplied in time and growth was fairly normal.

This year the climate was abnormal, orchid shoots grew late, and before they had rooted they entered midsummer, which caused the internal circulation of the whole orchid plant to fall out of balance, the new shoots stalled in growth, and the seedlings looked pitiful.

This shows that following a diagram to find a horse will eventually lead one astray.

Because he could not bear to see the orchids in this half-dead state, Jingbo decided to change the watering rhythm.

The initial method was to change the orchids near the sunny side to watering once a day, which made me discover another interesting phenomenon:

In roughly the same weather, the first time I changed to watering once a day, by the second day the surface of the orchid pot had already turned white; then when I watered the second time, by the third day I found the pot surface had clearly become much more moist.

With the same weather and the same time interval, why did the pot surface show such an obvious difference?

This gave Jingbo a new idea: when the orchid body is relatively short of water, there is a "binge drinking" period; after the "binge drinking" period passes, water demand slows, and the time for the pot to become dry lengthens.

This also explains why, after several consecutive days of saturated watering, the orchid pot no longer dries as quickly as before.

Guided by this theory, I personally feel that if one insists on watering every day, the orchids will surely go from too dry to too wet, and this summer they might well be finished.

So I controlled the watering interval as 1-2-1-2-1......

After several weeks of this, new green growth clearly increased, and the growth rhythm gradually got on track.

After rambling so much, I just want to explain the following personal view:

Watering should not be rigidly bound to time and season; interval dry, interval wet is the correct answer.

As the ancients said: one stretch, one slack, this is the way of both civil and martial. In this stretching and slacking, the yin and yang of orchid growth are balanced.

The so-called yin-yang balance is based on observing the environment inside the pot, and there is no shortcut!