Orchid Intimidation
Fear Not
I used to find orchids intimidating to grow. Their dust-sized seeds are fairly unique in not having any food reserves so — in the wild, at least — need the help of a fungus partner to get growing. And some orchids (epiphytes) spend their lives nestled in trees so need a special potting mix when grown in a pot. Orchids have above-ground structures called pseudobulbs. And many, especially those that call humid, tropical forests their homes, demand exacting environmental conditions that are very different from that found in most homes. Whew!
So I steered clear of growing any orchid for many years — until a local orchid enthusiast gave me a plant. After a couple of years, that plant, around this time of year, sent up a slender stalk which was soon punctuated with eight waxy, white flowers, each an inch across. For two months, those flowers greeted me each morning with their beauty and their delicious fragrance. Every year since, that plant has greeted me for weeks in midwinter.
Odontogl . . . a Mouthful
My orchid has no common name so needs to be referred to by its botanical mouthful, Odontoglossum pulchellum. (Even orchid names are intimidating, especially so because different genera have often been hybridized, and the resulting hybrid combines the generic names of the parents. So a hybrid with Brassavola, Laelia, and Cattleya in its parentage would have the name Brassolaeliocattleya. Now that’s a mouthful!)
Name notwithstanding, my Odontoglossum pulchellum has been easy to grow and get to flower. 
The plant spends summers outdoors in semi-shade near the north wall of my house, and winters indoors on a sunny windowsill. I water it perhaps twice a week, unless I forget.
Sounds like your run-of-the-mill houseplant, doesn’t it? So much for orchids being difficult.
The only special treatment my plant gets is a special potting mix. Odontoglossum pulchellum is an epiphytic orchard. Commercial potting mixes are available for epiphytic orchards but I make my own by mixing equal parts of my standard (home made) potting mix with equal parts wood chips. Nothing special about the chips; I just scoop them up from the pile that I use mostly for mulch that an arborist kindly dumps next to my woodshed every year.
Every spring I divide my orchid plant into 2 or 3 new plants, potting each new plant into its own pot with fresh potting mix.
More Orchids?
Odontoglossum pulchellum is an orchid that tolerates being treated like your average houseplant. And this is one of the most important points in growing orchids in a house: choose a sort that thrives in such an environment. Other orchids that will grow in the average home include phalaenopsis, paphiopedilums, and mini-catts, which are dwarf hybrids involving Cattleya (the corsage orchid).
Ideally, for flowering at least, certain conditions must be met. Most orchids enjoy bright light, which means setting the plant at an east, west, or south windowsill. From spring through autumn, light from a south window is too intense and may scorch foliage, so plants need to be protected with a thin gauze curtain, or moved to other windows or semi-shade outdoors.
Most orchids — again, for flowering — enjoy a ten to fifteen degree temperature difference from day to night, which is no problem in winter if you heat with a wood stove or already turn the thermostat down at night to conserve fuel. In the summer, the plant needs to be outdoors or else in a room that is not air-conditioned.
Even those orchids adapted to a home environment benefit from increased humidity. I raise the humidity around my plants by perching the flowerpot above a water-filled tray. Clustering plants together is another way to raise the humidity near plants, and also creates a visual lushness.
Once correctly sited, many orchids do not require inordinate amounts of care. Water requirements vary, but species with thickened pseudobulbs (bulbous stems), such as my Odontoglossum, get by with the least frequent watering. Orchid roots are susceptible to fertilizer burn, so the rule in feeding is to do it frequently and lightly. As with other houseplants, some orchid species take an annual rest, and at such times watering and feeding should commensurately diminish.
Since “mastering” the growing of one orchid, I have acquired another kind.
This orchid is Dendrobium kingianum, which does go under the more user-friendly common name of pink rock orchid. I have also gotten this one to flower — but not every year.
The Best Winter Herbs
Mini-Trees for Flavor
Second best to fresh-picked vegetables in winter, which are not within most gardener’s grasp with temperatures in the single digits, are fresh-picked herbs. Fresh-picked herbs — indoors — in winter are within the grasp of most gardeners, even non-gardeners.
Flowering and fruiting demand lots of light energy, but it is the leaves of most herbs that provide us with flavoring, so most herbs do fine in any reasonably bright window. The same goes for normal household temperatures and humidity.
So make space near your windows for herb plants!
Let’s look below ground now. Any potting mix suitable for houseplants will also be to the liking of herb plants. The mix should hold some moisture between waterings while at the same time drain well so that roots, which need to breathe, don’t suffocate. My own mix, made from equal parts compost, perlite, peat moss, and soil, provides air and moisture as well as nutrients and beneficial microorganisms that keep plants healthy. Soil dug from the garden and used straight up is never suitable; in the confines of a flowerpot, it holds too much moisture.
Now for the plants. Many people, perhaps most, choose basil as their number one herb to grow. Nix on that, indoors. Think of a Mediterranean summer with bright sunlight beaming down on warm soil. That’s what basil needs and what you can’t provide in winter except with supplemental light and, depending on your thermostat setting, supplemental heat. Not in my house.
I’d also suggest against parsley or chives. The problem is that neither grows fast enough to keep up with periodic clipping of the amounts normally harvested.
The best herbs for indoor growing are perennial, woody, subtropical plants. Before you bemoan my nixing of basil, chives, and parsley, consider these perennials: bay, rosemary, sage, and thyme.
Small, indoor rosemary “tree”
Bay, rosemary, sage, and thyme are also good choices for indoor growing because they do double duty: They’re pretty as well as flavorful, can stand repeated harvest, and live for years and years. My bay tree started life here as a small plant carried back in my backpack from California over 25 years ago. Fresh bay tastes quite different from the dried leaf, and much, much better. My rosemary plants are each a few years old and show no signs of decline.
Both bay and rosemary are happy to be trained as bushes, as topiaries, or as miniature trees. Mine are miniature trees, each plant with a short length of trunk capped by a mop head of leaves (and flowers, now, in the case of rosemary). Their training began early, when I selected a single vigorous shoot for each plant, staked it upright, and removed all other shoots. Once shoots achieved head-height (the height of THEIR proposed head, an artistic rather than horticultural decision), I pinched out their growing tips to induce side shoots to grow. I pinched the tips of side shoots to induce them, in turn, also to branch. All this pinching induced a dense mop head of stems and leaves atop each trunk. Small, lollipop trees.
Maintenance of the bay and rosemary is easy. Both are as large as I’d like them to be so every year or two, they get tipped out of their pots and and inch or two shaved off the outside of their root balls. After returning to their pots, potting soil gets packed into the space beyond the periphery of the root balls, giving new roots access to fresh soil and nutrients.
Their heads also get trimmed periodically to maintain their neat shape. The annual trimming provides a bumper harvest, but a few leaves or stems can be clipped for seasoning any time of year.
Bay laurel
I’m not enough of a fan of sage or thyme to grow them through winter indoors. But sage could be grown as a small, decorative shrub, especially varieties such as Tricolor, with white-edged leaves, Purpurascens, with purplish leaves, or Aurea, with some gold in its leaves. Thyme, which comes in various colors and flavors (lemon or caraway, for example), is a subshrub, or ground cover. How about a thyme ground cover carpeting the ground at the feet of a potted miniature bay tree?
Ongoing care for any of these herbs is watering, which can spell the difference between success or failure. Neither rosemary, bay, sage, nor thyme readily show their thirst with wilting leaves. Years ago, as I brushed past the little rosemary tree I was growing at the time, all the leaves dropped off. The plant was dead.
The potting soil for any of these plants needs to be kept just moist. Scheduled watering won’t do because watering needs changes through the season with growing conditions. A $10 “moisture meter” is an easy way to tell whether a plant is thirsty, as is, with practice, lifting a pot to feel how heavy it is.
Carrying the Sky on Their Backs
I saw two bluebirds a few days ago, but am not ascribing any significance to the sighting. They’re just pretty.
An Early Spring
It could be spring. Now. Indoors, with the sweet fragrance from a flowerpot of pastel colored hyacinths and other spring-flowering bulbs. All it takes is a little bit of trickery. The bulbs don’t have to wait till spring.
Knowing what a bulb is helps understand the trickery. But first: All that we commonly call a “bulb” is not, in fact, a bulb botanically speaking. To conjure up an image of a true bulb, picture a stem that’s been telescoped down from a couple of feet or more long to a fraction of an inch. All the leaves on that bulb also move down and closer together. The leaves, except the innermost ones, are thick and juicy, the better to store both moisture and food reserves. Near the center of the bulb is a sleeping flower bud.
Hyacinths, daffodils, and tulips are true bulbs.
Though often called a bulb, crocus is an example of a “corm.” A corm is also a short stem, in this case a short fat stem which provides storage for food reserves for winter and to fuel early spring growth.
Forcing a bulb, real or not, to flower early, indoors is, in many ways, just like forcing a cut branch of dogwood or plum to flower early, indoors. Daffodil, hyacinth, tulip, crocus, dogwood, and plum stems all enter winter with flower buds sleeping within.
All these stems of cold-climate plants are savvy enough not to start growing in the dead of winter, even after a freak warm spell. They do this by marking time, counting hours and days when temperatures are between about 30 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit, that is, cool but not frigid. Once sufficient hours have accumulated, their chilling “bank” has been filled, warmth can awaken a stem, whether its a dogwood branch or a daffodil bulb.
The first step in forcing a bulb is to get it to grow roots by planting it in a pot of soil or stones, or to suspend the bulb above water with only its base in the drink. A bulb’s roots, like the roots of other plants, grow whenever soil temperatures are above 40°F., so they can be in place and ready to support leaves and flowers when spring comes.
In time, typically 6 to 8 weeks, which varies with the type and variety of bulb, roots will grow and the the winter chilling requirement will be satisfied. Once the chilling “bank” has been filled, growth can begin. A well-grown, spring-flowering bulb comes packed with a flowerbud-in-waiting . . . waiting, that is, for a chilling period to break its dormancy and then sufficient warmth to allow growth. The larger the bulb, the more flowers-in-waiting.
Keeping a potted bulb cool at this point is useful for staggering flowering for multiple pots of bulbs or delaying flowering for a specific date, such as someone’s birthday.
When ready to enjoy the flowers, don’t just bring the pot into a hot room. They would blast open and collapse. The plants, at this point, need gradually increasing warmth, and enough light to draw out a sturdy flower stalk. Forcing bulbs to blossom out of season demands a certain amount of artistry in addition to science.
If you want flowers and want them now, and haven’t prepared bulbs ahead of time, you still have some options. Purchasing pre-chilled bulbs is one option.
The other option is to bypass the whole chilling rigamarole and force Paperwhite narcissi. These bulbs hail from perennially warm climes and will bloom without any prior chilling. All that’s needed is to pot them up and wait as long as it takes for the fragrant, white blossoms to unfold. To stagger their blooms, pot them up sequentially; lack of water keeps them dormant.
When the flower on a forced bulb has wilted and the show is over, the usual next home for the bulb is the compost pile. If the plant has been planted in soil, and if the emerging leaves can be kept growing in very bright light for many weeks, sufficient energy can be garnered keep the bulb alive through the following dormant season. Then plant the bulb outdoors this autumn and it should flower again — in a few springs hence, once it garners enough energy to also make flower buds.
