A Spike!
Yes, believe it, this entry is not about furniture or lacquer!
While watering my orchids and other plants in the office I discovered that my Phal has gone into spike! This is major news, very exciting — even if only to other orchid growers.
A while back my Phal started growing a new leaf, for quite a long time it had five instead of the usual four. A week or two ago the very small underleaf dropped off. This left the very, very large top leaf to become the underleaf, and the newly grown leaf then becomes to the top leaf.
This basically causes the entire plant to double in size.
The new psuedobulb of my Dend is still growing, even though some of the leaflets have dried up. I’m not sure if this is normal, it seems like it would be, or there’s some kind of problem. In either case, I think it’s doing okay now.
I really wish I had more room, it’d be great to have some more orchids. I’ve kept these two alive (though one died — not my fault — it had rotted roots when I bought it — which was my fault for not checking, but I didn’t know to check, lol) for over a year now, so apparently I’m doing alright. ;)
As it stands, I barely have enough room for all of my plants anyway. The two Pothos plants I have are growing at such an incredible rate I’m still not quite sure what exactly to do with them, lol.
Anyway, the spike. When a Phal orchid goes into ’spike’ that means it has started to grow the ’stick’ that the flowers will then grow from. Getting an orchid to rebloom is probably the most difficult part of growing them — at least in such lacking environmental conditions as my office, or a home in general; anything other than a humidity and temperature controlled greenhouse.