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White orchids and orchid babies

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I have three Orchids. Two are the more common variety and one is a little different – but I can’t remember what it’s called! The one that is slightly less common produces white flowers that look like this:

White Orchids 15

This is actually my oldest Orchid. It hasn’t bloomed for a while – like maybe three years. It was too busy producing baby plants!

Orchid air roots and baby

It has two or three baby Orchid plants growing on it. All are high above the main plant and have well developed air roots.

I’ll cut them off in the near future and plant them and hope that they continue to grow. Odd looking air roots though aren’t they?

The second white Orchid is brand new. I just bought it in early January and it was in bloom when I bought it and it’s STILL blooming! That’s almost two months worth of blooms!

White Orchids 11

I’m so happy that so many of my “indoor” plants are blooming this year. We’ve had flowers all year round between the plants in the garden and my seemingly every blooming indoor plants. It certainly helps keep the winter blues at bay!






Amaryllis from bud to bloom

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At the beginning of January we brought our three Amaryllis plants up from the basement where they’d had a two and a half month dormant period.

Other than the few pale leaves that they had growing at the time I didn’t expect more than leaf growth until the end of February or the beginning of March. After that I expected March blooms.

Two plants seem to be sticking to the plan, but one decided to send up a flower shoot only a week after I’d brought it upstairs into my sunny kitchen.

By January 23rd their was a flower bud on the Amaryllis’ stock and it was just beginning to open:

opening amaryllis bud

The next day the flower bud split in two and looked like a lobster claw for a few hours. Unfortunately I didn’t take a picture of it when it was like that. I was instead surprised to see how fast it went from partially open bud to this:

amaryllis buds opening 3

Three days after the bud had first started to open I discovered that the first flower was beginning to bloom (Jan. 26th):

amaryllis flower half bloom 2

Only hours after the first flower started to open the second one opened as well:

amaryllis about to bloom 2

By January 27th, only four days after the bud began to open, all four flowers were fully open and HUGE!

amaryllis bloom 6

Each flower was probably almost the size of a small bread plate! I didn’t get a photo of all four flowers in bloom this year though … Chris ended up being admitted to the hospital on the 31st and all photo taking stopped for a while. By the time things were ok health wise the flowers were pretty much done blooming. Oh well.

By the way this Amaryllis is the one I inherited from my parents. It’s a vibrant red/orange. My other two have white petals tinged with coral, peach and pink – like this.

Do you have any flowers blooming in your home right now? I just wrote a post on my main blog Tricia’s Musings about how we’ve pretty much been treated to flowers indoors and outdoors all year round over the past year.

Some shots of my Amaryllis in bloom

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Since I was telling you how I rescued my three Amaryllis from the basement in my last post I figured that it might be worthwhile posting some photos of the Amaryllis that I grow. I have no idea what kind I have, all I know is that I have two types. Two that I purchased as bulbs and grew on my own and one that I inherited from my parents. Unfortunately I don’t have any photos of my parents Amaryllis in bloom. If it blooms this year I must take a photo of it.

Here’s a close up of one of my Amaryllis blooms:
amaryllis

And for those that don’t grow Amaryllis, here’s a shot taken from a distance, just to show you how large the blooms are!

amaryllis

You can see one of my orchids blooming behind the Amaryllis just to the right. Orchid blooms are about two inches in diameter or perhaps a little smaller … so you can imagine just how big those Amaryllis blooms are!

Excuse the tacky curtains in the background! These pictures were taken in 2004 and those were the kitchen curtains that came with the house. They’ve since been replaced with cream white curtains.

The Amaryllis plants are starting to green up. You might remember that I said in my last post that when we brought them up from the basement they had new leaves on them, but that they were a pale green. Now that they’ve had a couple days of sunlight they are becoming greener. In a week or so I’ll start giving them a very weak dose of fertilizer and hope for blooms in two or three months.

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