My first 3 orchids I brought home from Hawaii about 10 yrs ago, were a phal, masd, and dend all NoID. Well having been into plants a while I figured the phal kind of looked like a bromeliad so I watered the crown-oops! The masd was watered once a week with everything else and dried up so I set it to soak in water for sevral days. Needless to say only the dend survived and thrived with my ignorant tendings and the darn thing is still going today.

I will probably augment this thread as I think of more things. At the moment, I can remember buying a mature Coelogyne asperata (which can be a meter or more across) that I expected to reside in my 12x12 bedroom in front of a partially obstructed south-east-facing window. I did use supplemental light for it and it actually did rather well for several months. No flowers, of course. Duh.

John :>)

These are all good. Thanks much.

I just thought of another one I did in recent history. I've been on this mini Dend kick. I love Dends to death. Anyway, someone offered me one in a trade named 'Little Pixie'. I couldn't find any info on it, but it sounded cute and small.
When the two-foot long box arrived I knew I was in trouble. Evidently the name had nothing to do with the plants size, just the shape of the flowers. Cute pointed flowers though, but a honker of a plant.

K

Early on, somehow I got a clue about my growing conditions and named them off to growers before buying any plants.

One dumb thing was believing growers who said of course, this plant will grow in "medium" light - when it needed higher light than I could provide without making major changes.

The most embarrassing thing, though, was deciding 2-3 different times that I knew - this time for sure - which direction the windows faced in the orchid room. A few weeks or months later, it'd dawn on me that no, they couldn't be facing, say, east because the sun was coming up over there and not over here.

It had to be my super-scared-to-screw-up-and-murder-something "orchid brain" because the rest of the brain cells could orient to NSEW and navigate around.

A brilliant genius on the Forum suggested using a compass. Wow! That it was a revolutionary idea shows how paralyzed the baby orchid brain was.

Because I'm pretty new to orchids, my dumbest moves may be still to come. Frightening.

Whitecat8

WC

If it's any comfort to you I hate it when people use NSEW in giving directions or describing where something is located in relation to something else. For some reason, my mind just goes numb. I can figure it out, but it just takes some time.

On a better note, if it's morning and I see where the sun is rising I know that's East.

K

When I first got into collecting, I ran an 11 gallon humidifyer full blast when my orchids were full of rot from over watering and the humidity outside was 75-80%... Huge "Blonde Moment"

Kevin - Thanks for letting me know about your similar experiences. It seems that some people are more right/left-oriented, while others are more NSEW-oriented. If I hadn't had to navigate for Girl Scout trips all those years ago, my natural-born right/left orientation would have remained pure, and I could tell you w/ confidence that the sun came up kinda to the left of the plant shelves. :) Whitecat8

I believed all the nursery guys who said dends had to be grown in a medium of big chunks of terracotta tile and in pots with holes down their sides. Then I went and placed an order for about 1000 dends without getting anything ready.
Now you've got to remember that none of this stuff is readily available here.If you want chunks of terracotta tile, you've got to get a hammer and smash them to the right size yourself. And if you want holes in pots, you've got to buy normal pots and drill holes in them.
Well, the dends arrived sooner than I thought and for the next week or so I actually employed a couple of guys to sit and smash up perfectly good tiles into small chunks. Then I wore out a couple of drill bits drilling holes down the sides of clay pots. By the last 300 or so I was so fed up of the whole darn thing I could have merrily dumped the whole stuff into a well-dug pit and covered it up with garden soil. But I kept muttering "this cost me thousands of rupees... This freaking monster is going to make very happy one day... "
Of course, towards the end, maybe the last 100 or 50 I started stuffing 2-3 plants in one pot, quit drilling holes down the sides and for some I even planted them in coarse-grained river sand !
Surprisingly all of them survived (I think its almost impossible to kill a dend in my conditions). Yes, even the ones planted in river sand , in fact they did so well that I seriously considered converting the whole lot to river sand. But take the trouble of repotting the whole lot again... I'd rather step on a viper!

About 5 years ago, I read or was told that if you can grow african violets you can grow orchids. Well the ones I had ( can't remember what they were.) I treated like my african violets. They are no longer with me, needless to say. Then I found this place and began to learn. Still learning thanks to alot of you here. I am up to about 40 -50 various plants now and doing good with most of them. Lynn

Hi all

I am proud to say that i still have my very first bought orchid, a Phalaenopsis. It still lives and, for me, it is the KING among the others. It teached me almost everything i know today. And i did SOOOOOOOO MANYYYYY mistakes!!!! Regardless, it still flowered for me, even weak and about to die. But now, 6 years latter, he is recovering very well. Can you imagine? I said that the Phal was my """really""" first orchid, but that's not true. But i consider it to be the very first one, because, it does not thrive if treated the same way like some other orchids i had since very kid. I am talking about Coelogyne cristata, C. massangeana, Stanhopea oculata, Paphiopedilum insigne Cymbidium sp. and Epidendrum radicans. These do very well even on pure "clayish", non aerated soil. And with tons of water. In fact many people here (that dont even know a thing about orchid culture) treat them this way, like normal terrestrial plants, and they still thrive, that's why they are so common. Dont ask me how, but that is true. The only orchid i had killed was an Oncidium varicosum. By the time i purchased it, i didnt understood that the health of orchids is measured, not by the ability to flower (like my Phal teached me, because orchids can flower, even if they are dying), but we can say if an orchid is healthy or not by checking the pseudobulbs and the roots. And that Oncidium was soooo shivreled (like a thin paper) that it died... That was a lesson for me hehe.
Michael

Well, mostly I've been growing orchids for four summers and three winters, and I've really done many, many stupid and careless things in that time. I tend to get cocky with success and then get careless.

But my stupidest thing involves clorox as a disinfectant-- sort of like q-li. I read in a book somewhere that you should sterilize clay pots for orchids by soaking in a 25% bleach solution.

Well, I thought, in one of my dimmest moments "If it works for clay pots, why not on expanded clay medium?" So the hydroton went into the bucket of 25% clorox.

That's a pretty strong solution -- my hands actually still stank of clorox after about five washings. I reeked of the stuff.

But after a little rinsing, I plunked about five catts into the cloroxed pellets. The penny dropped after a few days of smelling clorox everywhere, and when my hairdresser told me she smelled clorox on me. I checked the roots, sure enough, all dead. I had to buy new pellets and throw the cloroxed stuff out.

I was so embarassed at the stupidity that this is the first time I've ever even owned up to doing that. Jeez, it's a strong caustic and will burn right thru cloth, and peel cheap brass off bathroom fixtures, but I soaked orchid medium in it?

So now that I've confessed, I hope you'll just laugh back at me for mine, and not mind too much that I found some of these posts were funny. :D

A few years back, I lived in central Florida and had a 24ft x 65ft greenhouse full (Approx 1,500) of Vandas and Ascocendas. It was the first cold of winter and it was supposed to get to 28 deg. So I closed up the greenhouse as tight as I could get it and got the heater hooked up. It was on a thermostat to keep the greenhouse at 55 deg. All was well and I went to bed. At 2:30 in the morning, I awoke to hear no sounds of a heater running in the greenhouse, I jumped up, got dressed and proceeded to the greenhouse to see what the problem was. Sure enough the heater was not running, the pilot light was out and the temp in the greenhouse was at a very nasty 33 deg. I got my matches and proceeded to light the pilot but each time I struck a match (the large wooden variety), it simply would'nt light. I retried about 6 times and then it struck me...NO OXYGEN!!! The greenhouse was so tight that the large propane heater had depleated all of the oxygen out of the building and the fire went out.
There I am, in the middle of the greenhouse, laying on the ground trying to light the pilot in a place that had very little oxygen!!! Scary to say the least. When I finally realized what was happening, I went outside, opened up some of the plastic and went back inside and got the heater running. I did however lose several of my favorites...

no oxygen? and how did the plants handled that situation?

I wish my mistake was silly, funny, and of little consequence, but no. 20+ years ago, after getting a greenhouse, having a lot of plants, and accepting a lot of Catts from a guy that had been selling flowers to florists without sterilizing tools in between cuts, I had had a beastly infection in my bark mix of bush snails. Tried everything, including repotting all several hundred plants. No good. In my despiration, I bought a gallon of metaldyhide concentrate. It wasn't near enough to use a fresh batch for each plant, and to speed things up, I unpotted everything, creating lots of open wounds, to soaked the whole plant in the vat. Now I think by this time I certainly should have known better than to do what I did. I am sure that the only plants I did not infect with virus were the ones that were mounted at the time and therefore not considered a bush snail problem and didn't go into the vat. Course, this did not end the the bush snail problem.

By the way, read recently that metaldyhide does not kill snails, only knocks them out so that when the sun comes up it kills the exposed snails. There is a happy end to the story tho. Finally got rid of the bush snails by repotting everything into a closed mix that the snails can't get into. I liked it so well, I have never gone back to bark, and only feel sorry for others when I get a plant from a dealer with bush snails in it, cause they have no where to live in my greenhouse.

Last week decided I had to find a spot in the living room to put up our Christmas tree. My living room is filled with plants for the winter. There are octopus lights all over the room shining on the plants. I move tables of plants out and put in various places in the house until after the holidays. One batch of cool growers I wanted to put in my laundry area because it's unheated and sunny. Thought they'd be fine for a few weeks. But the room is so small, only the washer and dryer fit. So I put a tray of Oncids on top of the washer (front loader). Each time I did a wash, I'd put the tray on the floor. Yesterday, I came home to my husband cursing and shouting and found all my plants upside down all over the laundry room. He put on a load of wash and the tumbling knocked them all off the washer. I'm still picking bark pieces out of the clean laundry, socks, underwear, etc.
What an idiot idea.
Jane

Jane,

I'm so sorry, but your story, above all of the others, really has me LOL. That is *such* a thing that I would do!!

Carolyn

I cut the leaves on my very first orchid, a mtssa NOID, which had an ID at the time that I've since lost. I saw longish leaves growing out of 3 or 4 pbs and thought... this plant needs a trim. Little did I know that they'd never grow back and it hasn't flowered once since then.

LOL Jane your is the most hilarious story (forgive me but i cant!) I can imagine the scene LOLOLOL!!!

Put an Xmas tree in close proximity with a lot of orchids+? Did you soak the tree well in neem oil first? Or do you like living dangerously? Some one currently dealing with a little spider mite, a little mealy, and a little thrip, and working on trying to find some chemicals that won't set back any of the 750 other orchids of highly mixed genera, but will give me 100% kill, Cynthia, Prescott Az

Well i don't feel quite as alone in my stupidity now. : P

I usually soak my plants once every week or so -- rest of the time just a light drizzle of water. About a year ago had a Toshi Aoki 'Pizzazz' that was actually doing well for me. [Had one prior that simple died out of hand] It was growing so well and I was looking forward to actually blooming it. Then I gave it a soaking one day ... with bleach water. *sigh* I had forgotten that the water I had in the bucket was from cleaning. The windows had all been open with a nice breeze coming through so I had not noticed any chlorine smell. Needless to say, it died an ugly death.

Happy Holidays to you too Cynthia!
It's artificial. I wouldn't have even bothered except for my two little granddaughters who are expecting a visit from Santa at Grandma's house. I have more problems with my other dirt plants which I bring in for the winter. I have 3 Plumerias which were full of thrips. It's amazing, - I treat everything for about a month before bringing in the house, and once in the dry heat, these insects just appear again.
....still finding bark chips,
Happy Holidays everyone,
Jane

Gee, haven't you guys ever heard of spontaneous generation? All those little buggies of every kind just generate spontaneously on your best loved plants. They've been shown to have a very sinister kind of intelligence that senses which plants you can't stand to lose.

I thought everyone knew!

heh heh

Wow, Jane_ny, you have just cause a paradime shift in my attitude toward fake christmas trees. I think the next time I go for an Xmas tree (no grand kids yet, and maybe never) I may just go for a plastic tree. Cynthia, Prescott, AZ

Well, my most recent stupid stunt was to pull off a brown sheath before checking to see if there was a bud inside. Of course, there was and it ended up on the ground. Sob. I'd waited two years for that bloom. :

I went to my orchid society to try to figure out how to rebloom my only orchid, a Phal, that wouldn't rebloom after 2 years of getting it. That was a BIG mistake -I now have over 100 plants and they are taking over the house!! Needless to say DH wasn't too pleased, and this forum has only added to the takeover!!
Love you guys though -have a wonderful Christmas!
Sharon

Funny, Sharon.

Jane

I had bought four orchids on clearance for $6 each, their leaves had been scaled by the sun, so I reached through the mass to snipe off a dead leaf and in its fold was a spike! Then I have went to move one and broke a spike! I need to be more alert to those hidden spikes!

It's simple really...the dumbest thing I've ever done is buy my first orchid....I now have them all over! ;)

You guys know you wouldn't have it any other way.

Yes, spikes like to hide just so you do things like that. They have a very odd sense of humor.

K

Michigoose is dead-on: stick to tropical houseplants and you won't have the "pleasure" of most of those issues.

Sheesh. I wish I had realized that 35 years ago. Think of the money that might still be in my bank account that turned instead, into compost.

Absolutely! Getting started on this was probably the dumbest and most expensive thing I have ever done.

I had two gorgeous spikes with about 20 buds each, on a huge dend of mine, and was trying to get a closer look at the new root growth that was taking place, patting myself on the back because another great dend bloom was on the way, and smashed the spikes right into my cieling breaking both off right at the plant tip. oh well, it should be a good bloom next year.

I thought I would be really clever and mix my fertilizer and water with a portable drill and a device to stir paint. Works tremendously well .... er but my watering bucket that I mix it in for some reason has a spot that does not get stirred. Needless to say whatever plant got the bottom of the bucket got very healthy dose of fertilizer that sent it to plant heaven. (I did this twice before figuring out the deal).
Merry Christmas, Chris

Last summer I had these gorgious phallenopsis that had been growing all season in the shade. Well, come early September, on a beautiful clear, coolish day, I decided to place the orchids in a position where they would receive some direct sun. Well, I never saw leaves disorder so quickly. Within a day or so they had these ugly black burns and I learned about the value of shade.

Buying too many orchids! Now my DH has assembled TWO greenhouses in the basement, painting them white, and installing lights into them. He's almost finished. DH says he got me into orchids by encouraging me to buy my first one (although I picked it up first).

Carol

A den/phal I've had for @3 years.

2 years ago when carrying the orchid from work to my car, I bumped the spike into a wall and broke it at the base, I cut it off and put it in a vase.

Last year, was putting the same orchid in the car from displaying at work, thought I had it squeezed into the car well, when I went to shut the door the spike popped loose and was smashed as the door shut. Again, cut the spike and enjoyed it in a vase.

This year it hasn't spiked/bloomed, I think it figures what the heck, it isn't worth the distress ;-)

Bob

Dumbest thing I almost did: Last night - use vet strength pet stain and odor remover liquid instead of fertilizer in the RO water for the 'chids. We just got the pet stuff, and the plastic jug is the same size & color as the fertilizer jug. Thank goodness, the holiday madness left me with a tiny speck of clarity. Whitecat8

BUY THE FIRST ONE!

Picking my first orchid off a door prize table at a daylily club meeting. Enjoyed the blooms for months, almost pitched it because I didn't think it would ever bloom again, ignored it for months except for the occasional splash of water and lo and behold, it bloomed again. Then came the grocery store rescues for $5 a pop, bringing those back to life and getting them to bloom.

100 orchids later, greenhouse under construction and yes, another plant addiction borne.

Brooke

I decided to put all of my white phals in a big red or black pot. I thought they would be gorgous if I could ever get them to bloom. That's when I learned the value of leaving the labels in the pots... I can't seperate the white ones from the colored ones, nor can I buy more of the really happy vigorous growers..... oops!

Oh jeez, I started off with 2- a phal (12 blossoms!) and paph. I saw them in the orchid bark and thought- Gee whiz! I need to repot these in proper soil!
So I repotted them in miracle gro potting soil. And put the phal in direct sun on a 90 deg. day. Stupid!
It got sunburn and started dying immediately. I tried so hard to save it...spent 2 weeks just dragging its death out. I took it to the nursery- I didn't know diddly about orchids (obviously), potted it in the bark again, cut off the sunburned leaves, doused it with physan (it now had root rot, and I didn't even cut off the bad roots). The blossoms dropped immediately as well. Then I cut the spike, and cut more leaves because the infection was spreading.
So then I was left with a pathetic looking plant, half spike and only 2 leaves. Then the crown starting to rot. I threw it out soon thereafter. It just got too depressing watching it die. I really wanted to save it- it was a get well present from my mother. It's amazing what we will do for these plants.
Miraculously, the paph survived. Definitely learned a few lessons here!

BTW- I really enjoyed some of these stories. I've only been at this 6 months, and I still feel rather thickheaded at times.

The dumbest thing I did when I first started collecting cattleyas was throwing out a valuable plant because it test positive for virus. It was a rare BC. Hartland 'Fields' and it showed no flower disfiguring or leave necrosis, but I had all my plants tested. Hartland, being at the time 40 years old already, was undoubtedly virused. I threw it out along with a few other rare plants. It took be 30 years later to find another plant of Bc. Hartland 'Fields'. I'm babying it. It's probably virused but it doesn't show any problems. I keep the plant isolated. Virused plants can be kept as breeding stock and for their intrinsic historical value. If they have color break virus, I'm more prone to destroy it, but now some plants I have are one of a kind. So I'm more lenient to such plants.

the dumbest thing ive done so far was putting my phal that with the spike was 3 1/2 feet tall in a 90 degree room with no ventilation. and the crown was wet. needless to say it was mush

One of the first orchids I ever got was a Dendrobium pierardii, in bloom - beautiful and fragrant!
The next winter, when all the leaves suddenly fell off, I thought "okay, that sucker is dead" and tossed it out.
Now I know it is deciduous, and was just getting ready to make buds...my bad!
Regards - Nancy

This thread makes me LOL!
During my ignorant youthful years (ie when I was 12) my mother got a beautiful phal as a gift. Everything was going well...and then summer came along, and my family was going on vacation. My mother wanted to let her friend take the plant for the month and a half that we were gone, but I insisted that 'orchids are tropical plants that like sun and heat'...so we proceeded to put the plant in this extremely sunny and hot bay window. A month and a half later, we came back to find a shrivelled dried prune of a plant. Apparently our district had a heatwave, and with no AC/blinds, the plant had inadvertently met it's demise. We even found some candles had melted in the house. Needless to say, I'm proud that I've moved on from those days.

I'm sure I did lots of dumb things when I was growing orchids last time, but I just did a dumb thing last week! I bought a beautiful NOID phal-type den with three spikes and only one bloomed flower, so I'm SO excited to see it when all the flowers open! Well it came in a tiny little 4-inch plastic pot, but it's very rootbound and the largest cane is probably 14 inches tall, so needless to say it's topheavy and can't stand upright without support. I have a little blue tin pot that's cute but also very light. I decided to put it in the tin pot (plastic pot and all since it seems so happy) but hadn't gotten around to weighing down the pot, so it stood upright but just barely. I set it down, ON TOP OF THE TV, right in front of the cat. Three guesses what happened next.....that's right, orchid on the floor and a broken spike!

Luckily it was the shortest spike with only 4 buds, but now it only has one....*sob* Needless to say the pot now has rocks in it to weigh it down, ad no longer sits on the tv. And I have had a serious "discussion" with the cat about what messing with my orchids will get her!

Speaking of cats - another dumb thing I did was put a new Psychopsis w/ a nice spike on the floor, right where the cats sunned themselves. Before that, the cats hadn't bothered Phals that were on the floor, but they were off to the side. Kerplunk bit off the spike, leaving a stub about 4" long.

He wasn't to blame - I'd invaded his territory and messed with his nap time. It took awhile to figure out how to keep the cats out of the orchid room and still have the door open for air circulation, but if Kerplunk hadn't bitten off that spike, I might have trusted him in the orchid room with all the orchids. Yikes!

Whitecat8

My friend had a screen door installed to keep the cats out of her plant (mostly orchids) room. She had hardware cloth put over the screen itself so they couldn't tear it.

Greenhouser,

Thanks for the suggestion. Many on this forum helped me wrestle with the cat/orchid room situation. Finally, I hit upon a solution that involves things around the house: a wastebasket w/ a brick in the bottom, an empty suitcase, a heavy ceramic planter, a box w/ full bottles of liquid in it, and a kiddie gate wired so that it stays extended when put in a vertical position. Ugly and bulky but inexpensive and effective.

Whitecat8