Orchid Care

What to Do After Your Orchid Flowers Fall Off One day your orchid is covered in blooms. A few weeks later the last flower drops, and you are standing in front of a bare green stick wondering whether you killed it or whether it is going to be fine. The honest answer: it is almost certainly fine. But what you do in the next few months is what separates orchids that rebloom reliably from orchids that sit on a windowsill for years – looking completely healthy, never flowering again. ...

You probably saw it on the care tag that came with your orchid: three ice cubes, once a week. It sounds almost too tidy. And if you have spent any time in orchid forums since then, you have discovered it is also controversial enough to start arguments. “Ice cubes are safe.” “Ice cubes damage roots.” Both camps sound certain. Both are talking past each other. The reason for that divide is not that one group is right and the other is wrong. It is that the ice cube method has a specific scope, and that scope almost never gets explained clearly. Whether it helps or harms depends less on water temperature than on the orchid genus, the potting medium, the condition of the roots, and whether water is actually reaching the right places. ...

Orchid Leaves Turning Yellow: 8 Causes and Solutions You noticed it this morning: one of your orchid’s leaves has gone from deep green to a soft, unsettling yellow. Now you’re second-guessing everything – the watering schedule, the spot on the windowsill, the fertilizer you used last month. Orchid leaves turning yellow is one of the most common worries orchid owners bring up, and the good news is that most of the time, it’s fixable – or not even a problem at all. ...