Everything I have to Say about Orchid Care! | How to Care for Phalaenopsis (Moth) Orchids

Welcome. My name is Amanda. Welcome to the garden. This is the garden. I'm in the garden because it's summer and I'm going to be outside in the garden as much as I possibly can. And I'm going to always be dirty. That's just the way it goes. But in today's video, I would like to talk about orchid care. Moth. I have a hard time saying the word moth. Moth. Orchid care. I'm failing everything. Phalaenopsis species. And I have a whole tub full of them right next to me. We're going to learn the very basic care. The things that you absolutely need to know. Maybe some other fun facts. I don't know. Whatever just comes out, comes out. But I'm going to try to organize it so it's very easy for you to follow. So I want to welcome you to my video. Thank you for the video. It's a video. Thank you for subscribing. If you subscribe to this channel. And thank you for joining the email list on planterina.com. If you haven't, you're going to, you probably should think about doing it because you can find orchids like this and you're going to get crazy, crazy discounts. Crazy discounts. Seriously though, they're crazy discounts. So just check it out and you know the deal. Just do what you do. Do what you do with, you know, let's do it. Want to hear some fun facts about orchids? The moth orchid flowers are edible. People put them on dishes to garnish them and to make them look pretty. And you can eat them, but I have never eaten an orchid flower just because I think they're so pretty. It's just like eating pretty, eating pretty. I don't know. I'm just going to say orchids. Okay. There's so many different types of orchids. There's 30,000. Am I making this number up? Different species out there that are known and there's thousands and thousands of varieties. And there's so many different colors, as you can see shapes, sizes, some live like decades. They can last. I mean, you might be thinking this probably happened to you once you got an orchid sometime in your life and it flowered. It looked great for months because they flower for months. And then you chucked it out when it was done flowering, which is like, well, it's done. Just some leaves left, but guess what? You can keep them blooming and growing. Don't throw them out. Just put them in a cooler location. And then once you see, I'll go over that. I just got right into the video, but I'm just saying there's so many different types, so many different types, but we're going to talk about the moth orchids. Okay. The Phalaenopsis, you know, just good thoughts when you think of an orchid, because they symbolize like fashion and beauty or whatever. They're just, they're pretty freaking gorgeous. And that's why they're pretty popular. They're probably the most popular gift. If you've never like literally sitting back, like leaning so crazy, I gotta, maybe I'll just do this. That's better. If you've never gotten an orchid as a gift, you will one day receive an orchid and you're going to wonder what to do with it. So just watch this video and you'll learn all about it. Or you can just look at the tag the orchid comes with. And then you just save yourself a lot of time, like 25 minutes, probably. You'll get 25 minutes back and you'll save 25 minutes in your life. An orchid, this is, this is my thought on orchid giving, gift giving. It doesn't say like, I love you. It doesn't say you're okay. It's just like, or it doesn't say like, I'm sorry. It just says, I'm thinking about you. I saw something really beautiful. I want to give it to you because, Whoa, that doesn't, all my notes. I have to have notes now because that's what happens. What happens now? It's all mixed up. Oh boy. Here we go. This is what happens when you try to shoot too many videos in a day, too much content in one day. Oh boy. Those orchids inside the shirt, flat orchids. I'm gonna hear something sad about orchids. There are, some are close to being endangered or extinct because the, uh, the habitat loss is kind of crazy. It's unfortunate that a lot of the, the niche environments they live in are being destroyed. So stop doing that. Please stop destroying their homes. Okay. And the other thing is they're being cultivated illegally. They've been taking out of nature in their environments illegally and sold from the black orchid markets and stopped doing that too. So there's respect. We need to speak for these orchids. Okay. That's this goal. That's just a fact that is a dark fact. It was a dark, dark fact. Some orchids, and I actually don't know which ones, maybe I'll look it up and put it on the screen. Some of them need a dormant period. Some of them are going to bloom. Actually, a lot of them do. Forget about that. Done. Here's another fact. This is like the best fact about orchids. They're so freaking easy to care for. You think they look so fragile, like, Oh, be careful. I'm gonna, you're gonna hurt me. They're not. They're hardy. They really only need a little bit of care from you in order to provide you with this glorious, glorious demonstration of color and an appeal. Orchid appeal, moth orchid appeal. I have them all in a bucket because I think they just look fabulous. As you can see from, from this assortment of orchids, there's white, there's white and purple. There's purple and pink and white. There's purple and white. There's, I would say this is the gold color, yellow, gold, pink, fuchsia, different color, different color, yellow, white with a yellow center. Shift it for you like this. Lav, lilac, lavender, lilac. I don't know what that color is. Someone called me colorblind once. I'm definitely not colorblind. I just don't know what that particular soft pink purple. There's dark red. I mean, yeah, there's red. There's a lot, there's a lot of different color orchids. And I have a hard time finding the same ones over and over again because they're, they're just seeds are different. And I think just they mutate and they become different colors. I love orchids. I love orchids. I didn't use to love orchids because I didn't want to have to care for anything when I was younger. And someone would show up like to my house or wherever I was living at the time. And they'd show up, that doesn't fit in there. So they would, I'll take that out of the pot. They'd show up with a beautiful orchid. I'd say, oh, thank you very much. And then after they would leave, the orchid would just go someplace like, I don't know, I forget about it. I was young. I wasn't really, I was more, I was thinking more about outdoor plants than indoor plants when I was super young. Way back, way, way, way back. So then, you know, I discovered that. This is a problem like shooting so late, so late for me, it's like 4.30 or 5 o'clock. Tired. So yeah, I was not a big orchid fan in my younger years, but now I'm, I'm literally inundated by a waterfall of beautiful orchids for this moment, this moment in time. Me, you. I make my own parody on myself because it's so easy to do that. I spend a lot of my time, I spend a lot of my time boxing myself into spaces that I can't get out of when I'm filming or doing projects. I ended up, I just surround myself with stuff and then I wear clunky shoes and I trip. I knock stuff over. I knock the stuff over and then I just get frustrated. Whatever. It doesn't matter. I'm usually the only one there and I just talk out loud and bitch out loud. So that's it. Okay. I'm just going to just get right into the care part. So let's talk about the light. As you probably know by now, if you're watching any, any plant care videos, not mine, anybody's, doesn't matter. Direct light on orchids or most houseplants is a big no-no. Just do not do it. It could burn them. I did a couple of, I did a couple of boo-boos myself this spring. So I was just trying to prove people wrong. They're right. They're right. Don't put your, seriously out of my brain. Keep them out of direct light. I know they're indirect light now, but the sun is setting behind this privet hedge and it's going to be protected. So it's so pretty though in the light, isn't it? Keep them out of direct light. Give them as much indirect light as you possibly can, which means six to eight hours per day of filtered light. You can put it far back, like 10, eight to 10 feet back from a Southern facing window outside of the rays of the sun or on a Northern exposure in a Northern exposure closer to the window because they grow in the canopies of trees and they're used to quite a lot of indirect light. So they need that. Don't deprive them of the light they need. That's enough of that light. That's easy. Like I, this is such an uncomfortable angle to sit. I'm not sure what I say and what I've said ever. So I'm just going to say it again. Watering. The watering of orchids is kind of critical. You should take them out of their pots, their perspective pots. You see, you take them out of their pots and if it feels crunchy and dry, you have to water them because what will happen at first, the blooms will start to wither and droop and just become like crepe paper, right? And that's not good because these blooms can last for months, but you have to keep them hydrated. You have to hydrate your orchids. So if you feel them crunchy, you want to soak them in water once a week, maybe every 10 days. Depends on how much, how hot it is in your place. You got a hot place. You got a hot house. You want to water them more frequently and you'll see that this is not soil. It is, and here I have to say this word again because I hate saying it because I can't, svagmum moss, svagmum moss. And this is, this is what this is growing in. This is the growing medium. It ain't soil. If you are opposed to soil, if you don't like getting soil in your fingernails like I do, then orchids are great because you don't have to deal with dirt. Dirt is out of your life and it doesn't get all over the place. It's getting your hair, it's on the floor, just dirt free. If you're going to water an orchid that's in bark chips like this one, you'll have to keep it in the container and make sure the container has drainage holes so the water will drain out. So it's very, very different than watering one that's in moss because you can stick the moss in a bucket of water, let it soak for like 10 minutes, even less, probably less. Take it out, drain all the excess water out and put it back in the decorative pot. Okay? So that's, that's the watering. I know a lot about watering. There's a lot about birds. They change their tune. So thank, thank, thank you. Thank you for that. Let's talk about some temperatures. So they don't like it really cold. They don't like it really cold. That's why they're tropical plants. So try to keep them in temperatures that are above 60 degrees Fahrenheit. And if it gets like over 90, they get really hot and they start not liking it. Nobody likes it over like nothing. Everything slows down and you just don't want to move and they just are going to need so much more water that you probably just don't want to deal with it. So just keep the temperature lower. Okay. And that's really it with the temperature. It's to keep them out of cold, away from cold drafts, keep them out of the freezer. Think about how good it feels to feel a nice cool breeze. It feels so nice. Or just even a warm breeze, just any breeze, especially if there's zero circulation, air circulation. Orchids love it. I think it also just reminds them how they used to be outside and they're kind of pissed off that you can bring them inside, but just give them some air circulation. It keeps fungus and bacteria away and it makes them remember the good old days, being free. Now they're captives. Orchids love high humidity levels because they're from the tropics. Period. Period. They want it hot. They want it humid. They want it moist. They want that air to like, you want to breathe it and drink it at the same time. That's how humid they want it. So crank up the humidifier, put pebbles in a tray, fill it with water, put your plants on top of it. That's another way of giving them moisture in the air. Or you can, don't mist them. Don't mist. Don't mist. Just stay away from misting your plants. Some people really like doing it. That's fine. I like doing it too sometimes, but it's not a very effective way of increasing the humidity for your beautiful moths. Moth. Orchids. I'm getting to the end, okay? I'm really getting to the end here. There are fertilizers specifically designed for orchids, right? You can buy that or you can just use a complete, a complete balanced liquid fertilizer every so often, like every two weeks during the growing season. And then when they're done, like when they're, when they're done, they dropped it. They dropped it. They're bare. They're like, and there's one here that's almost done. I'm going to show it to you. I've been getting very comfortable and I'm now going to have to lean. I might take a nap after this. This beautiful little orchid is just about finished. There's a couple of, a couple of flowers left on here and oh, it has a bud. It has a bud. So when your flowers are done, let's imagine this is finished. You will want to stop fertilizing them because what's the point? Seriously, what's the point? It's going into like a semi-dormancy. You're going to cut these little stems, these flower stalks off at the base here, put it in a cool area, minimize the light it's getting, and then in no time you'll have another shoot coming out. I don't know how long it'll take, five months, something like that. Actually, no. Just give it time. Be patient. Let nature come to you. Okay. Let it come to you. Don't worry so much about what kind of fertilizer you're using. Just a complete liquid fertilizer is going to give, give this plant everything it needs. Okay. Not this one, but these. I do want to say something about selecting orchids or we ship orchids. So we, when we do ship orchids, we ship orchids that have some buds that are half budded and half blooming because we want you to have the experience of looking at a beautiful flower, flowering plant, but also enjoy the process of watching those buds open because it's really very amazing to just watch it. I time-lapse it sometimes because why not? It just pops. It pops. So when you're selecting one at the store or wherever you're at, plantarena.com, look for buds. Look for buds. If there's like one bud, just don't buy it. I'm going to get a lot of emails from you saying you got one with no buds, just all flowers. Very busy day in customer service. My bad. So yeah, they do flower for, in general, orchids will flower once a year, once a year. So, and, but they'll flower for months. So say you get yours in January and it's flowering and it stops flowering April. We'll give it a long blooming period. So for May, June, July, August, September, October. In October, it's like six month dormant period. But in during that dormancy period, we'll say it's dormancy. It's going to start creating, growing a new flower stock. And so by January of the year after, you'll have buds and flowers again. So don't toss them away. You have to give them an opportunity to do what they do. It lasts a long, long time. This is the last thing I'm going to say about orchids. And then you're free to go. You're free to just roam, roam the hallways without a pass. You might need a hall pass for this one. But the last thing I'm going to say, I wrote it down and I forgot. Oh yeah, they're non-toxic. Freaking fabulous. So your pets can just, just enjoy them and not worry about getting sick. Okay. So that is it. That's all you need to know about orchids. Pretty simple. And I'm really focusing on the moth orchids. Oh yeah. There's one thing that you should know. You don't really, shouldn't use ice cubes to water them. That's cold. Could you imagine someone put ice cubes in your pants and left them there and you couldn't get them out of, just saying, don't do that to them. That's not nice. Just room temperature water. And if you really want to be fancy, you can use sparkling water. No, just, you could use filtered water if you're concerned, but don't worry about it. They're not that sensitive to water. That is it. Thank you so much. Why'd I do that? But thank you. I was shaking your hand. Thank you so much for watching this video. I really appreciate it. And I hope you learned something about orchids or you probably just looked at the care card that came with it or the little tag. It tells you pretty much everything right there. So did you just waste 25 minutes of your life? I don't know how long this video is going to be. 15 minutes. Anyway, I gotta go. I gotta, I gotta go.