Orchid of the day: Cattleya Love Knot (and new lights!)

Cattleya Love Knot

Here is one of our Cattleya Love Knot orchid flowering again late in September this year. After we divided the single plant, the new divisions have been producing two flowers at a time. I hope both these new plants it will produce more flower stems soon. Both are doing very well.

This is very inspiring and Arne has invested in purchasing a brand new light. He is quite motivated and has written a little something about this. 

New Lights and a Swedish Supergrower of Orchids ~by Arne

Now and then I check the web-site from the Swedish Orchid Society – you may want to think of it as my alma mater of orchid culture.  One day - I guess it was about one-and-a half-year ago I realized that one single person living in the south of Sweden was dominating the whole society.  In fact, that is an understatement because I think he is one of the greatest orchid grower I know of in the northern hemisphere.  His name is Tommy Ljunggren and you should check out what he is doing at his web-site http://ljunggrens.org/.

The reason why I’m impressed is that he is defying all problems associated with the culture of the most warm and light loving orchids at the 60^th latitude.  That means culture of almost only Vanda in a sun-deprived and considerably cold location that is north of Newfoundland in the USA.  He has been able to achieve all this mostly because of persistence, interest and knowledge.  Nevertheless, since some 10-15 years ago there are also artificial lights nowadays that are so strong that extremely light-loving orchids can indeed be cultured even in a basement.  So from now on, we have our first super-compact fluorescent light fixture in our basement and we expect supergrowth.

To the right, a new 'strong' light has been added to our basement make-shift orchid  sanctuary. This light would be great during the winter months as some of our orchids are from the tropics,  for example our Aerides houlletiana, which is growing bigger in size.

I will conclude this post with two pictures of our very reliable Cattleya Love Knot. A new post will follow next week as we have a few up our sleeves! Until then, have a great week!