I finally got to spend a whole morning in the garden and it was time to pay a little attention to the orchids. These particular orchids (Cymbidium) grow forwards; when you pot them, you put them near the back of the pot and measure about 3 fingers width to the front, which means they've got room to grow.
These poor blighters hadn't been touched in 3 or 4 years, so they were growing outside the pots, as you can see in the following pictures:
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So the first move is to remove them all from the pots and get rid of the "medium" - they don't need earth, since they're epiphytes (ie. they'll grow with their roots in the air and they derive nutrients from air, water or any plant/medium around them) . The medium, in this case, was coconut shells, dried fern roots, corks and broken bricks. Once the plants are removed, you can see three things: a vast amount of roots, dead pseudobulbs (where the leaves are attached) and possibly two or even three plants in one:
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First order of the day; remove the excess roots. This is pretty drastic, but they soon grow back again, and too many roots means the plant gets stressed, producing more leaves and roots rather than flowers. Once the roots are gone, then the dead pseudobulbs get removed. Then it's easy to see if there's one, or maybe even two or three new plants. From the 6 plants I repotted, I got 12 plants.
Final step was to repot them with space to breathe and grow, and securing them with a metal brace so the plant doesn't move. If the plant is well-secured, it will soon grow healthily; if the plant is unstable (ie., if it moves when you gently shake the pot) then it will not grow.
The two final pictures show the newly potted plants (which then got soaked with water and vitamins) and the flowers.
Unfortunately for me, most of the plants flowered while I was in the UK. The perfume is glorious, but the flower only lasts about 7-10 days, once a year!
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