Find us on Instagram maxandmilesplants or email maxandmilesplants gmail. Explore Plants Resources blog share your story. Orchid Bloom Loss: Is it Normal? Normal Bloom Loss A natural orchid cycle typically sees the growth of leaves in summer and early fall, followed by a bloom spike in late fall or early winter, then blooming in early spring.
Some orchids will bloom for several months before the blooms wilt and fall off. Instead, you can expect your orchid to bloom for up to three months after your purchase before bloom loss. If the blooms on your orchid have a typical lifespan and then slowly wilt and fall off, you have nothing to worry about.
Reblooming Tips Once your orchid loses its blooms in the natural lifecycle, you have a few options on your next steps. Leave it alone and fertilize every weeks with a balanced houseplant fertilizer nutrient ratio diluted to half strength. The plant may rebloom on the old spike. I earn a commission if you make a purchase through my referral links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Orchid bloom loss can be normal when your orchid reaches the end of its blooming cycle.
The cause is almost always environmental. Which is good news, because it means you can change things to retrigger blooming. In all other instances, something in the environment of the orchid is causing blooms to fall off.
Both too much water and too little water can trigger bloom loss. If your orchid is receiving too much water, roots may rot, causing blooms to fall off prematurely. Unfortunately, to the dismay of new orchid owners, this happens quite often. One explanation is bad lighting conditions. If your orchid is exposed to insufficient light, its blooms can unexpectedly fall off. Orchids require bright, indirect light. This calls for exposure to an east-facing or west-facing window.
Direct light can be tolerated for up to hours per day. Orchids can be affected by a number of diseases and pests, some of which may influence the health of buds and blooms. More commonly, blooms and buds are affected by pests like whiteflies, thrips, snails and slugs, caterpillars. Flowers can look chewed up, deformed, and they eventually fall off. Depending on the type of the disease and pest affecting the plant, you will need to use a fungicidal spray or an insecticide solution to fix the problem.
Orchids need warm temperatures between 65 F and 80 F degrees. Orchid owners often overlook the temperature changes that can occur because of cold drafts, AC vents or simply a sudden drop of outside temperature. Cut from an inch above the node. This can induce a secondary spike — which is like a branch on the spike — giving you more flowers.
Though you can get more flowers from the old spike, they might not be as big or impressive as the first ones were. This is why some orchid growers opt to cut off the whole spike as soon as the bloom is finished. To read more about trimming flower spikes, please see HERE.
Flower spikes start to grow out from in-between the orchid leaves. They can grow pretty long, depending on what type of orchid you have. The longest I know of is over 3 feet long! They take a few months to grow to reach the blooming stage. Once the bloom is finished, the flower spike will start to die back. In the future, your orchid will grow new spikes, sometimes even more than one at the same time.
So your orchid has finished blooming, and maybe you even got some more flowers from a secondary spike. Seal the cut mark with powdered cinnamon the kind you use for baking too. Cinnamon helps close up the wound faster, preventing bacterial infections, etc. Use this chance to inspect the roots properly; check for pests and trim off all the roots that are mushy or dehydrated.
Water the plant and put it back on its place. Your orchid will now start to focus its energy on growing new roots and leaves. Do it only if you needed to do it anyway before the orchid spiked. I hope this article has answered some of your questions regarding orchid flowers.
The blooming stage is exciting and even rewarding. I still get so much joy every time I see a new spike emerge! At the beginning of my orchid journey, the flower spikes truly tested my patience — simply because it takes so long for them to reach the blooming stage! But by doing so, orchids have also taught me patience.
You need to allow the plant to determine the speed of things. No spam - I promise. I got a pot of live orchids for my birthday and the flowers lasted for 2 months! I never had orchids before and did not know what to expect. Anyways, after 2,5 months of blooming the plant started dropping flowers.
I was terrified. Your article game reassurance that it is just a natural process.
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