damselfish | Plant Update

About a year ago, I bought some orchids-- two tiny dendrobiums, each $6. I knew three things going into it: that I like orchids, that my mother with her green thumb and award-winning roses can't successfully grow them, and that most people can never get them to flower again. You buy them in bloom and then no more flowers, which is why you see them so frequently indoors: they can handle low-light and once the flowers are blown, you just replace them with something else. But for $6... why not give it a try? The worst that could happen is they die.

I was told to get them to flower, I should put them outside. Well they were outside, and they burned, so they've been inside.

As the seasons changed, the sun moved behind the building, my balcony got no direct sunlight (down from punishing full, all day sun), and two of my hibiscuses dropped all their leaves and grew in a new set of smaller leaves (Black Dragon is still a twig with almost no leaves). A month ago, the lightbulb went off in my head: there's no direct sunlight on my balcony! I can put the orchids out! So I took out the two dendrobiums, along with the phalaneopsis I picked up at Home Depot because I liked the pot, and left them there to forget about them some more.

This morning I go out to water the hibiscuses and grumble to myself about my two major annoyances with them: the moss growing in their pots (moss! WTF) and the flies that hover around the plants. They're not on the plants, they're just... around, and they get inside when I open the door. I often have these little flies buzzing around my apartment and driving me crazy and making me paranoid they'll get into my food and making a breeding population and I'll be overrun by these little black flying specks. It hasn't happened yet. I'm on the 8th floor, aren't I not supposed to have bug problems? But the fauna that visit never cease to amaze: I've seen ladybugs, bees, dragonflies, and just yesterday a monarch butterfly went swooping by from the tower above me.

I glance down at the orchids and notice that Good Plant has dying tips on some of its leaves, but those tips have been there for a long time. Then I notice that Super Excellent Plant* has yellow things on it. "Oh Lord. What the hell else is going wrong with my plants?" I push a leaf aside and the yellow things bob.

They're flower buds, dangling on the ends of delicate stems like little bells.

Not to count my chickens, but I've gotten an orchid to flower a second time. I am awesome.

*Originally Bad Plant. Then Bad Plant started looking like it might die, so I swiftly renamed it Super Excellent Plant, just in case my calling it Bad Plant was sabotaging it. Or something. Anyway, it is-- obviously-- still alive. It's scraggly compared to Good Plant, with only a few stalks, but it's not dead. And now it's flowering, soooo I guess it is a super excellent plant.