I realized the other day, that I never told you guys about the results of my summer orchid experiment. You may recall, that at the start of the garden season, I said I was going to put my orchid collection out in the Woodland garden for the summer. We have very humid summers here, so I thought they would LOVE it.

Well… they didn’t. The orchid lovers out there will know that orchids can’t take any direct sun. I thought the cover of the maple tree would be enough to keep them safe. But it turns out, that the woodland garden got a lot more sun in the late afternoon than I originally thought.

I thankfully noticed before all of their leaves got burned to a crisp, but not one orchid got out without some serious sunburn on one or more leaves.

So I gathered them all up, and brought them back in the house for a little surgery (i.e. cutting off the burned leaves). Then I put them back out, but this time in the protection of the sun porch. They’d still get all the heat and humidity, but with out the chance of frying in the sun.

My hope was that at least one or two would put up a bloom stem. I have gotten orchids to rebloom, but only sporadically. I have a couple that have never rebloomed.

And while the all recovered from the sun incident, and put out lots of new roots (probably soaking up all that humidity) not one got a bloom stem.

They are all back in for the winter, have been cleaned and given a good feed, and most are in a north facing window (I’ve had the best luck with north and east facing windows when it comes to orchids). Maybe we’ll have some luck this winter.

But that’s not to say I don’t have any orchid blooms at the moment.

The bright yellow one I got on our adventure to Colasanti’s back in August still has a couple flowers on it.

This big beautiful white one I got from Home Depot back in March. Can you believe it’s still in bloom? I didn’t put this one outside over summer because it was just so nice having it in the living room blooming away. The flowers on this one are huge too – about the size of my palm (minus the fingers)

And this one is a new addition. Picked up from Walmart the other night. I feel like I haven’t bought myself a plant in ages. It’s probably only been about a month to be honest, but it feels like forever. And I don’t think I have one quite this colour. (Though it’s entirely possible I do!)

So I’ll enjoy the flowers on these ones for now, and you’ll be the first to know if any more decide to bloom.