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I find benign neglect works well for orchids, they don’t seem to appreciate helicopter owners. My friend mounts orchids on trees and her wood fence with burlap which disintegrates about the time their roots take hold. They do well and flower, and she had so many, this in SWFL.
I have a few in my lanai and a couple in trees. I have a vanilla bean orchid that DH pollinates every year for beans. We started training it downward but not soon enough and it requires a tall ladder, I have another one I am training on a horizontal branch and a different variety in a pot with a trellis that will be more easily pollinated in the future.
That is so cool! But why does it have to be so far up? I'd break my neck!
If you look closely at the picture with the ladder in it you'll see that vanilla plant is growing from ground level up the tree. Vanillas are vining orchids that can grow 100 feet long, some types of vanilla orchid species can reach 200 feet in length. Vanilla is semi-epiphytic, it can grow in the ground and also grow up trees and on other plants without being in contact with the ground. The vanilla vines that are grown commercially in greenhouses for harvesting the vanilla beans are kept shorter and trained to grow on trellises, wires or other types of support systems for easier reach and manageability.
That is so cool! But why does it have to be so far up? I'd break my neck!
It doesn’t have to be that high at all. They usually don’t flower until the vine is 20 feet or so, but can be trained downward or wrapped around a trellis. It was a novelty when we planted it and we never expected it to actually do anything. We have it going downward now, otherwise it would be to the top of the tree and well beyond the reach of a ladder.
We harvested seven vanilla beans the first year, seventeen this year and it’s looking like we will double that amount this year with all the flowers. The beans are ready to be picked in January after being pollinated in April/May.
Unlike other orchids, the blooms last one day only and have to be pollinated before noon. It’s been a fun, unexpected learning experience.
I posted this over in photography too. It’s a cockleshell/clamshell/octopus/black orchid and this is the first year it has bloomed. I’ve had it for two+ years and they can produce dozens of flowers as they get older. There are two other flowers ready to bloom. In the macro it looks huge, but the flower is quite diminutive and also presents upside down.
We went into June hand pollinating the vanilla orchids. That is a bit longer than before but there were more flowers over a longer time period. We had a high of eight flowers on one day to pollinate. We have 45-50 beans and will lose some between now and when we harvest at the end of the year. I’ll be happy if we end up with 30. They look like green beans and the brown on the end is the dried up flower. If I find a flower on the ground the day after pollinating, I know it wasn’t a successful pollination.
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