Orchids grow strong in the mountains, so why are they hard to keep after being transplanted home? The reason is here

Orchid growers often complain to me that orchids are just too hard to keep, no matter what they do they cannot grow them well: either the leaves turn yellow and the plant looks thin and scraggly; or the roots get burned by fertilizer; and you also have to watch out for too much or too little water.

Of course, here we are discussing wild mountain-collected orchids; those high-end greenhouse orchids are not part of this discussion. That is because greenhouse orchids have a completely different set of growing and care methods, like a child raised on Western fast food: if you asked him to go mountain climbing, it would clearly be too cruel.

Let us first look at the environment of wild orchids in the mountains. Most of them grow on slopes. The advantage of a slope is that it drains well, and no matter how much rain falls, water will not collect. There is a lot of fallen leaf litter. Year after year, these fallen leaves, with the lowest layer combining with the soil, form humus soil with very high fertility, and the root systems of wild orchids mostly grow horizontally, right in this layer of humus soil. Look at the trees beside them: after autumn they have all dropped their leaves, yet in summer these trees can spread a cool canopy of sky. From this you can see that orchids like shade in summer and sun in winter. Also, we rarely find orchids in dense shrub thickets. Where there are orchids, there is certainly some ventilation around them, just like in the picture.

Wild

The reason wild orchids grow in these places is that they all follow nature's law of elimination. In places they are not suited to, even if an orchid occasionally appears, it cannot multiply into a patch. After reading the detailed explanation of wild orchids above, we can roughly draw a conclusion. Actually, this conclusion (or rather, what orchids prefer), we have also mentioned before; it is just that some orchid growers have never seen wild orchids, so reading an article alone may not make it clear.

First, there must be no water accumulation (in the wild it is a slope). The growing medium must contain organic fertilizer (fallen-leaf humus soil). Shade in summer and sun in winter (refer to deciduous forests). Ventilation (look at the surroundings of wild orchids). Master these points well, and I believe you too can grow orchids well, especially wild mountain-collected orchids.

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