Orchid care experience sharing, teaching you how to grow orchids well

        I have been growing orchids (Chinese orchids) for over ten years, and currently there are two to three hundred pots that have not been repotted for 10 years. For over ten years, like all orchid enthusiasts, I went from passion to obsession to now a calm stage. I never post in the orchid forum, because there are too many orchid enthusiasts there in the obsession stage, just like me 10 years ago, who would listen to the half-baked ramblings of those "theorists, classicists, academics" and would not think things through with their own brains, let alone ask orchid vendors (orchid farmers) for their experience. The orchid-growing (Chinese orchid) craze 10 years ago was far more intense than now; that was a truly crazy bull market, when orchid vendors from Fujian could casually grab a bag of sorted common orchids and fool people out of tens of thousands of yuan. Now orchid enthusiasts are basically rational about buying orchids, and orchid vendors have restrained themselves a lot more.

        10 years ago, I subscribed to all kinds of orchid journals and magazines, bought all kinds of orchid books I could get, and then grew orchids according to the experience in those books. I used every growing medium and fertilizer on the market, tried all kinds of "private orchid-growing secret recipes" I heard about, and attended various orchid exhibitions and orchid markets. From over a thousand pots of orchids at my peak to now three hundred-plus pots, I then arrived at my own views on orchids (Chinese orchids):

      1. Orchids (Chinese orchids) are a kind of grass with very strong vitality; in their place of origin they grow very well completely at the mercy of nature. Never touch newly sprouted buds with your hands or try to change the way they grow, because doing so may easily cause hard damage to the bud and make it rot.

      2. Growing orchids must "suit local conditions": according to your own home situation, create an environment suitable for orchids to grow well.

      3. Treat orchids like raising your own child. Do you want your child to be strong, highly self-reliant, and healthy in every way, or weak and able only to rely on you to support them for a lifetime? Then you rationally decide whether to care for the child or spoil the child.

        Orchids brought down from the mountains or bought from orchid farmers' fields are generally very healthy. But many orchid enthusiasts, as soon as they buy them and bring them home, soak them in medicinal liquid to "disinfect" them; anyway, you cannot hear the orchids calling for help. Flower pots that have come out of several hundred or several thousand degrees of high temperature, and newly bought growing medium, also have to be disinfected with medicinal liquid, as if pathogens had long been lurking there, knowing that sooner or later orchids would be delivered for them to eat. A prisoner just entering prison is rinsed with cold water, yet newly bought orchids are soaked in poisonous water. After the child is poisoned and symptoms appear a month or so later, you go to the hospital for help, and those half-baked experts chatter away pointing out all kinds of pathogen names and teaching you all kinds of treatment methods, then keep going until the orchid is dead, making you beginners feel how difficult it is to grow orchids.

        4. Most orchids are loved to death by their growers:

      (1) Using all kinds of fertilizers and medicines on orchids turns the growing medium into "poisoned" soil. Never get overly fertilized water on the buds; if you do, the buds will definitely rot.

      (2) "Dry orchids, wet chrysanthemums"; most orchids are watered to death, not dried to death. Orchid aerial roots can absorb moisture from the air; even when the leaves are so dry they "cramp," one watering restores them. But staying in wet growing medium all day long lets all kinds of pathogens breed.

      (3) "A tree moved dies; a person moved thrives": some people move their orchids around every day, carrying them out in the morning to see a bit of sunlight, then moving them to a shady spot at noon, then carrying them out again in the evening, making the orchids very passive: just as they want to share the sunlight evenly across their leaves, they are moved away again by their owner.

        5. The issue of sun exposure: the growth of all things depends on the sun; plants rely on the sun to make the nutrients they need for growth, and animals and humans then eat the plants' nutrients, indirectly depending on the sun. My orchids are all kept in full sun, but I also provide shade, mainly because I fear that some moist potting soil, when exposed to the sun's high temperature, will cause hot water vapor to steam-cook (rot) the new shoots. If the potting soil is dry, I do not care at all; orchids are rarely killed by sun exposure, but some leaves will develop black spots from sunburn.

        6. Orchid pests and diseases:

      (1) First, diseases: orchids can get many diseases, just as people can get many kinds of diseases, but not all diseases will afflict one person all at once.

    If you let orchids get more sun, they rarely get sick, unless you are fixated on practicing your "ten years of watering skill" and water them into illness.

    There is also a terrifying "Byras virus," which I still do not believe in: I have several large pots of Longyan Su with more than 50 shoots each, and a half-baked orchid enthusiast insisted they had "Byras virus." To this day these pots of "growing with cancer" Longyan Su have grown more and more vigorously. Over more than ten years, many orchid enthusiasts have divided and grown them, and like me they only repot large pots without dividing the clumps, all being pots full of grass with dozens or hundreds of shoots, and I have never seen "Byras virus" flare up. I also asked large orchid growers Chen Shaomin, Li Yinglong, and others, and asked orchid farmers in Fujian and Zhejiang, and they all said: "Heard of it, never seen it." So I think many stories of "whole greenhouses dying from Byras virus" are made up.

      (2) Now about pests: my orchids' main pest is scale insects, all from winter crowding in plastic greenhouses with too much humidity. A friend joked: "Orchids with scale insects have fewer scorched tips," which also makes some sense, showing the importance of humidity to orchids. Other pests include snails biting tender shoots and flower buds; sometimes earthworms get into large pots; ants rarely enter orchid pots. So I occasionally spray omethoate once for scale insects.

        Now I grow orchids very casually: I absolutely will not disinfect orchid plants, growing medium, or orchid pots. My favorite growing medium is volcanic rock. Because I found that the vigorously growing orchid shoots were all grown with volcanic rock as the substrate. I absolutely do not use "pond stone"; over time it crumbles into powder, cakes on the orchid roots, blocks airflow, and causes waterlogging damage. For growing medium I use the kind the size of soybeans; I think there is no need for granular medium to be coarse on the bottom and fine on top; on the contrary, fine on the bottom and coarse on top is even a bit better for root growth. Granular growing medium is convenient to manage; you can water as much as you like (most people like to water), and anyway once you pour it on, it runs right off.

        There is also the problem of rotting new shoots: I used to water very carefully, afraid that water droplets falling into the leaves of new shoots would cause shoot rot; now when I water, I use a big ladle and pour it right over the top without worrying about anything. Because I found that orchid farmers or large orchid farms all water by pointing a tap water hose right over the top; if that would rot shoots, they would never water that way. Later I figured out the reason: shoot rot happens when, at high temperatures, water vapor in the growing medium evaporates and the roots of new shoots are too tender and get steamed "cooked." So my experience is: do not water at high temperatures; if some pot's growing medium is damp in a high-temperature environment, then cool it down (do not let the water vapor become hot) and move it to a cool, ventilated place. Therefore, I rarely get shoot rot; if there is shoot rot, it is definitely because it stayed in a high-temperature environment while the growing medium was moist.

        Summarizing my more than ten years of orchid-growing journey, here are some humble observations for orchid enthusiasts:

        1. Buy an orchid-growing book and read it, because it is more comprehensive than what those experts teach you. (The more content in the book, the more royalties the author gets). But "believing books completely is worse than having no books."

        2. If you can avoid watering today, then do not water the orchids; more than 90% of diseases are caused by watering.

        3. Orchids "do not cease to be fragrant because no one is around," which shows they are very self-aware. Why do those large orchid growers and orchid farmers grow them well? Because they have too many to take care of them all and will not give special attention to any one pot. If you have 10 children and cannot take care of them all, the children will all turn out accomplished; if you single out one to favor, then you are harming them. Growing orchids is the same.