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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.

Sorry – no Green Thumb Today

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I’ll bet that all my Green Thumb Sunday members have been wondering why there was no GTS post last week or so far today? Well, I’ve had a bad week or rather both my husband and I had a bad week.

Chris ended up being admitted to the hospital last Friday because he had chest pains while at work (in same hospital he was admitted to – how convenient!).

If you read the post I linked to on my other blog you can learn more about his heart trouble. Basically they think he might have a rare heart arrhythmia that can cause sudden death, but haven’t been able to prove it just yet. We’ve been living with this since 2004. The doctor that admitted him to the hospital last Friday also noticed that on previous trips to the ER and or admissions his Cholesterol had always been quite high – both the good and bad cholesterol as well as having very low triglycerides, so he thought that it might be good to do an angiogram on Chris to take a look at his heart and make sure that he didn’t have any blocked coronary arteries.

As it turned out, we had to wait until Monday for the angiogram and the test was clear. His heart looks good from the inside. So he was discharged Monday evening with a prescription for Cholesterol lowering meds (Crestor) and instructed to set up some out-patient tests like a 48 hour Holter monitor and a stress test.

He’s been home all week recovering from the angiogram, but he’s feeling fine. He’s going to go back to work on Tuesday. He really only felt bad on Friday afternoon – so he wasn’t the best patient in the Acute coronary ward at the hospital because they had to keep telling him to stop wandering around the hospital. LOL he just didn’t want to be there since he felt ok.

Luckily the hospital is only a few blocks from home – a 10 to 15 minute walk. So I was able to just walk back and forth to visit. However, since I’m not all that healthy myself (Crohns, vitamin d deficiency and bad back pain over the last year) it took a toll on me and I’ve kind of been recovering over the last few days too. Believe me, it sucks to be sick, especially when your spouse ends up also being sick and admitted to the hospital!

As I said in my last GTS post my Amaryllis was in bloom so I took a whole series of pictures from buds to full bloom. I just haven’t had a chance to prepare the pics. They are still on the camera and I’m sure they need some cropping … so that will be next weeks Green Thumb Sunday post – hopefully!

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