Fertilizing orchids like this will prevent them from blooming, don't wait until you notice before correcting it
Autumn is the bud-setting period for orchids, and the care during this time determines whether they will bloom and whether they will produce many new shoots next year. After a spring and summer of sprouting and growing, orchids have consumed a great deal of nutrients, and autumn is when they most need to replenish their energy.
For fertilizing orchids in autumn, Haoshe Farmer also mentioned a couple of days ago that organic fertilizer should be the main choice, with chemical fertilizer as a supplement. Autumn fertilizing is very particular, and the ratio of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium is different from late spring. During spring and summer, the main goal is growing new shoots, so the nitrogen proportion among the three elements can be slightly higher when fertilizing, but autumn is mainly about setting buds and protecting the buds, so nitrogen can be stopped and more phosphorus and potassium fertilizer should be applied.
The most important point of autumn fertilizing is this: if you do it poorly, the orchids will abort their buds. A fellow orchid grower of Haoshe Farmer suffered a big loss last year. Not only did the autumn fertilizer fail to protect the buds and promote bud development, it also burned all the orchid's flower buds to death. What exactly was the reason?
As for fertilizing methods, we have talked about them before: root application, drenching application, top-covering application, and foliar application. Root application is mixing fertilizer with the growing medium, so the fertilizer applied this way is absorbed evenly and lasts a long time. Drenching application has the fastest effect: mix fertilizer with water in a certain ratio and pour it into the growing medium, where the orchid roots absorb it directly. In spring and summer, this method takes effect the fastest.
Top-covering application means spreading fertilizer on the surface of the pot. The advantage of applying it this way is preventing fertilizer from burning the roots, and even if the fertilizer produces some harmful substances, they will volatilize at any time. Foliar application is a relatively safe fertilizing method, generally commonly used when supplementing trace elements, with the orchid leaves absorbing the nutrients, and it also takes effect quite quickly.
Among these 4 fertilizing methods, the one to avoid in autumn is the drenching application method. Autumn is when flower buds have just emerged, and the flower buds are still invisible under the potting soil and very tender. If you use root drenching to fertilize at this time, it is very easy to burn the new flower buds, and after they are burned, you cannot detect it from the pot surface. Orchid growers can only find out there was a problem when the orchids fail to bloom the next year, but many people still do not know what exactly the problem was.
For autumn fertilizing, Haoshe Farmer always uses organic fertilizer that was composted in summer, mixing it into the growing medium, which can also save the trouble of changing the growing medium the following spring.
Growing orchids is not difficult; the key is to be able to discover problems in time, so that you can keep learning experience through setbacks and failures.