Here are some late winter bloomers I have going - I'm excited about the days getting longer and longer - I've also noticed a new growth on some of my orchids so hopefully the increasing sunlight will benefit them..or maybe it was the sunlight itself that has stimulated the growth? Eitherway, I'm hopeful that spring is on its way.

Cymbidium "Swan Lake" (Camelot x Balkis) - this was the one which I was asking whether the growths were spikes or not...lucky me! My first cymbidium ever too! The two photos show what a drastic difference lighting can have when taking pictures. The first photo is more true to the actual color.

Dialaelia cattleya "snowflake" - this one seems to do really well with me which is strange since all my other laelia/catt types are suffering. It put out two taller and fatter pseudobulbs this year with 2 spikes of flowers. The lighting kind of changed while the buds were forming, and I had the unfortunate experience of a thrips infestation during the early development of the buds, so the flowers are all twisted in weird directions. It's cool how they change color though, opening paper white and deepening first to pink, then to salmon.

Some random phals I have blooming

Siderea japonica - another one of those plants which I for some odd unfathomable reason seem to have no problem with at all...this one produced 2 spikes this year, each with 8+ buds. Smells fantastic! I am growing it in a weird mix - I originally had it in a plastic pot, roots wrapped around cocohusk and sphag wrapped around roots...my grandpa decided to repot one of my plants one day and stuffed it into a larger pot with clay pellets around it.


(Is that moss starting to grow?!?)

The other is still in the plastic pot and is not doing as well (only 1 spike). So if anyone wants to try this method and see if it works for them, that would be interesting.

This is a paph which I have lost the tag for but it's something along the lines of deiri or deidri ...I'm proud of this because it is one of my first succesful revival attempts - I stuffed it into a plastic deli container with some moist paper and just left it - and now it's growing a new bud for the first time ever! I've had this thing for 2 years now and it's my first paph to rebloom!

This is the setup I have right now - I'm finding that the plants don't like the CFC very much. I don't know whether it's a frequency difference in the light, but I have been trying to get the distance right for the entire winter, moving them back when they get burned, etc...I can't really tell whether it's even helping hte plants. And yet, just 3 weeks of good weather and more natural sunlight and I can see my plants growing better. I can't tell whether it's just that time of the year, or whether the sunlight is actually doing something.

A fun picture I took of some water on the roots of my bulbo.