How Do You Fertilize Orchids? An Ultimate Guide To Feed Your Orchids
Orchids are the favorite ornamental plant of many people due to their elegant beauty. You need to provide your orchids with enough nutrients so that they can bloom abundantly and beautifully. How do you fertilize orchids?
Your orchids should get fed weekly during their growing time with diluted fertilizers. Also, remember to water them before fertilizing. You can nourish your orchid with artificial or natural homemade fertilizers.
Today, let’s learn more about orchid fertilization with Swipe Garden.
Orchids are the favorite ornamental plant of many people due to their elegant beauty.
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When Should You Feed Orchids?
Orchids need nutrients to grow, so you should feed them properly. The best time to start fertilization is after your orchid drops its blooms.
Expert orchid growers weakly feed their plants once a week. Some orchid growers get great results using organic and inorganic orchid fertilizers together.
The recommended orchid fertilizers contain phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium with a ratio of 20:20:20. During the growing season of this plant, you should fertilize them once a week with an orchid fertilizer solution of 25% concentration.
In their dormant season, you can manure them once per month. The fertilizer solution for this time should have a concentration of 50%.
Whenever you fertilize this plant, remember to wet the soil before applying orchid fertilizer solution. In this way, you can protect your orchid from getting burned roots.
During the growing season of this plant, you should fertilize them once a week.
How Do You Fertilize Your Orchids Naturally?
Artificial fertilizers are convenient, but they may contain harmful toxic for your orchids. You can take advantage of natural ingredients to nourish them.
Natural fertilization is beneficial for your plants, your budget, and the environment. Some popular natural orchid plant manures are eggshells, dried chicken bones, milk, molasses, etc.
Orchids are tropical plants that can’t stand anything cold, so you can’t put ice in them.
We will provide some recipes to make these manures at home later in this post.
You can naturally fertilize your orchid plant one or two times per month during the growing time of the plant.
How to care for Phalaenopsis orchids? Fertilize your Phalaenopsis orchids every one to two weeks when it grows and every three to four weeks when Phalaenopsis orchids are blooming or in winter.
When you buy an orchid plant, like a phalaenopsis orchid. The fertilizing orchids and potting mix are enough to keep the phalaenopsis orchid plant alive and healthy.
How Do You Make Homemade Orchid Fertilizers?
Now we will move on with some natural fertilizer recipes for orchid plants. The ingredients used in these recipes are easy to find in your home.
Ground eggshells
Eggshells are ideal food for your orchid plant as they contain a lot of calcium and potassium. These nutrients are essential for your precious flower plants to thrive.
Here are the steps to turn eggshells into manures.
- Boil a liter of water.
- Clean 12 eggshells and grind them well.
- Add the ground eggshells into the boiling water and turn off the heat source.
- Let the eggshells sit in water overnight.
- Pour the eggshell mixture into a spray bottle through a strain.
Spraying your plants with this solution fortnightly will help provide them with more potassium and calcium.
Eggshells are ideal natural manure.
Dried chicken bones
Chicken bones are another source of calcium and magnesium for plants that you can easily find in your kitchen. You can follow the recipe below to make manure from chicken bones.
- Rinse and dry the chicken bones in the sun for 2-3 days.
- Crush the bones into sand-like crumbs.
- Put the crushed bones into a large bowl.
- Drop some green tea leaves into the bone’s bowl to add nitrogen.
- Mix the bones and tea leaves with milk and a teaspoon of molasses.
- Pour some rice cooking water into the mixture and stir well.
You can sprinkle your orchid with this chicken bone mixture every month.
Simple liquid fertilizers
You can make a solution of one part of cow’s milk and four parts of water for fertilizing your orchids. Another choice is a molasses solution made with one teaspoon of molasses and 1 liter of water.
You can use cow’s milk for fertilizing.
How Do You Get An Orchid To Bloom Again?
After the last flower has fallen, your orchid will begin dormancy for about 6-9 months. It needs proper care during this time to be ready to rebloom. Follow the steps below to get your precious plant to bloom again.
- Cut your orchid’s flower stalk at the base if it has already turned brown. If it’s still green, trim it off just above a node. This video will provide more specific instructions on how to make the cut.
- Give each orchid three ice cubes weekly for watering.
- Feed the plant with the fertilizer solution of 50% concentration every two weeks. Skip watering it with ice cubes if you have fertilized it.
- Ensure that your plant gets a lot of sunlight during the day. At night, you can move it to a cold spot. The temperature change will stimulate the plant to bloom.
- When you see some orchid roots with a mitten-like head sprouting, the plant is about to flower again.
Conclusion
Hopefully, through this post, you have learned how to nourish your orchids with fertilizers. Proper fertilization will help this plant thrive and produce more blooms. It’s also interesting to make natural manure for your flowering plants by yourself. Thank you for following this post!
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