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Caring For Orchids Part One: Watering

© Linda Fortner

Welcome to the Orchid Garden. Are you addicted to orchids yet? During the past few months I have written about the most common orchids people grow. During the process, I have received many questions about how to grow and care for orchids. With this in mind, beginning this month, I will share information on how I care for my orchids. I will be discussing watering, temperatures, light, air movement, air quality, humidity, fertilizing, and potting. I hope you will all learn something from these articles which will make growing orchids a pleasure both for you and for them.

Watering

;One of the fastest ways I know of to kill an orchid is to overwater it. The media (potting material) most orchids are grown in is very different from the potting soil that most plants use. My first orchid was an Oncidium mounted on a piece of cork bark, for example. My mounted orchid was easy to care for. I would simply soak the bark in a sink full of water once a week for about 30 minutes. I would also mist it heavily with a spray bottle of water every three days or so. It is very hard to overwater orchids that are mounted, but yes, you can do it by soaking it too long or too often. Underwatering is also a problem that some beginners encounter because they think their orchid is like a cactus or an air plant that doesn't need watering. Needless to say, this is completely untrue. You will need to find a happy medium between underwatering and overwatering which I know is hard to do at times.

The next orchids I purchased were planted in tree bark. Now, that material is sure a lot different than the soil used by my house plants! With my house plants, I could just insert my moisture meter into the soil and know for sure if they needed to be watered. But it is very difficult if not impossible to insert a water meter and get an accurate reading in the bark potting material. So how do I know when to water? A trick I learned was to lift my pots and feel the difference in the weight before and after I watered (the difference in weight can be very slight, however). The goal of watering is to simply moisten the bark potting material. The bark absorbs water and it stays wet in the middle of the pot where the roots are growing. The biggest mistake new growers do is to feel the top of the bark. Since the bark will feel dry, they water the plant -- over and over.

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