Water Your Orchids by Variety

One of the most difficult parts of growing orchids can be watering them correctly. Each species and variety within a species can have different requirements for watering, and it can be difficult to keep them all straight. If you are the type of person who really loves growing things and you want to try growing different types of orchids, just be very careful with how you do it. In general, you’ll need to work on one variety at a time so that you know its requirements and don’t water it too much or not enough.

How to Get Started

As a beginning orchid grower, it’s a good idea to start out with just one type of orchid. That way, you can get on a regular watering and fertilizing schedule that will work for all your plants, for the most part. Make sure you do your research so that you can pick out an easy grow variety that won’t easily get you into trouble if you water a little too much or not quite enough. If you really do your research right, you can probably land on a variety that needs watered less than once a week.

Watering Schedule

It’s a good idea to get into a regular routine with watering and checking on your orchid plants. When you water orchids, mark it on your calendar. Then, depending on the type of orchid you have, mark another day seven to ten days away, give or take a few, so that you know when to water next. The amount that you need to water will depend also on the growing medium and on where your plants are located, so keep this in mind.

Setting up Your Watering System

Now that you’re on a schedule and have one or two plants of the same variety thriving, you can look at adding different types of orchids to your collection. Simply do the same thing with these orchids. Maybe you water one type every seven days and the other every ten. If this is the case, just make sure you stay organized so that you know which plants to water when. You may even want to come up with a system of marking the individual plants so you know when they last were watered.

How the Experts Do It

For the most part, it’s a good idea to stick to just one or two varieties of orchids until you have their care down to an art form. Experienced horticulturists with lots of time spent balancing the needs of different types of plants can often get away with collections of lots of different orchid varieties. Even then, though, they must either remember to mark their plants or to keep similar varieties grouped together so that they don’t under-water or overwater certain plants when they get lost in the shuffle.

Watering orchids isn’t rocket science. It simply takes the right information and a willingness to spend some time devising a system that works for you. Pay attention to the signals that your plants are sending you about their watering needs, and you’ll be just fine.