Nature and Gardening

6657 readers

3 users here now

All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.

See also our Environment community, which is focused on weather, climate, climate change, and stuff like that.

(It's not mandatory, but we also encourage providing a description of your image(s) for accessibility purposes! See here for a more detailed explanation and advice on how best to do this.)

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

So I asked my neighbors for old orchids to try to rebloom (pixelfed.social)

submitted 1 year ago by sean@lemm.ee to c/greenspace

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been getting into orchids lately and reading a lot about them. I have a few, but thought it would be fun to get some more to learn about how to care for them best.

I posted on my local buy nothing group (a neighborhood facebook group where people give away stuff they don't want anymore). I asked if anyone would give me an old orchid that wasn't flowering and said I'd return it if I could get it to bloom again. Well, I had to cut the post off after 18 hours because so many people responded!

The picture shows the first 7 plants I received, but not the 4 I already owned or the 3 more I picked up the next day! I assigned each one a number so I can keep track of whose is whose.

Most were in pretty good shape, just dusty and a few dehydrated. I looked them all over and gave them a wipe down and a watering if they needed it and assessed their needs. One needed to be repotted right away, I think it had been kept too wet and it had a lot of rotten roots. I'll repot a few of the others in the next few days. Otherwise they're off and growing around my house! I'm excited to see how it turns out.

top 6 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] GiantBasil 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Oh, I do that, kinda! Some people just give me their orchids like I'm some sort of tropical necromancer. I just have a yard and like plants.

Most of them just live on trees outside now.

[–] Hotchpotch 4 points 1 year ago

I really love the idea of a tropical plant necromancer!

[–] sean@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wow so cool! I wish I lived in a climate where growing outside on trees was possible. I live in Seattle, not exactly prime territory. Although I would like to learn about orchids native to the area.

[–] GiantBasil 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

To be fair, I live in the tropics, we're the land of perpetual summer, so I'm pretty much cheating with a bunch of plants people struggle with in gardening groups. If you manage to grow some local orchids, please tells us about them, I'd love to see those! (And to learn when your current ones blooms)

On the downside I absolutely cannot grow stuff like tulips, anything that requires mild Northern hemisphere weather is a no go.

[–] sean@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

On the plus side for Seattle, I'm in fern heaven here! And there are massive tulip farms just outside of town. So I don't have it so hard here either :)

[–] GiantBasil 1 points 1 year ago

Oh, seattle must be amazing for ferns! I can grow the tropicals and some other stuff like maiden hair outside, BUT most of them need to be on shadowy areas and I cannot skip watering, summers might need twice a day

I'm jealous, about the tulip farm, I've only seen those in photos.