Cymbidium Seedling Progress

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve and I'm looking at some nice buds plumping up but nothing's open yet. December has been mild and wet. We've had three very nice storms giving us almost 4 inches of rain total. The storms have kept us cloudy and much cooler with the low temperature one night dipping to 32 degrees, and most of the other nights touching the low 40's. This week's been much warmer and brighter with a slight offshore and fog tonight.

This spike has grown very little since the picture from 12/9 but the buds are filling out and growing......slowly. The nice bright days and mild nights are welcome.

Happy New Year to all!!

Surprise cymbidium spike

A surprise! A cymbidium spike opened in the growing range. I think it is a variety that usually blooms around Valentine's Day. Small flowers for a standard, short spike with 6 nicely shaped flowers. This plant had 3 spikes and the other 2 will be open this week. We are having a wonderful warm bright beautiful Santa Ana day (breezy but not windy).

The other flowers in the vase are red anthuriums, purple Beallaras and lavender Miltonidiums...our usual fall bloomers.

Cymbidium Seedling spike progress

It's been about 10 days since my last picture of this Cymbidium Red Beauty seedling's first spike and it has grown. The stem has elongated and the buds are spacing out with the bottom ones showing their individual placement as the tip continues to grow. This makes it easier to count the buds. There are 12 buds, very dark color. The suspense and excitement makes me want to hurry the bud and spike development along......BUT, overheating or overhandling can result in a broken spike or blasted buds.

I'll just be watching until they decide to open. We've had cool overcast and foggy days, then a few warm sunny days, with nights in the mid fifties. Last night the thermometer recorded a low below 50 degrees. The National Weather Service shows a front coming through today and a stronger colder one for next weekend (maybe some snow for the ski resorts). This will probably slow bud and spike development. The temptation to apply heat to speed things up is great.......But too much heat will make the buds turn yellow, shrivel and fall off (often called "bud blasting").

I picked the spike above to watch from a couple of tables of seedlings of the same cross because it looked like it would be the first to open. After taking this picture, I noticed another plant with an even taller spike and 15 buds. It is pictured below.

Blc. Oconee 'Mendenhall'

Blooming this week with beautiful large fragrant flowers. It has produced a lot of very nice hybrids for us in the past. Perhaps, it's time to try it again with some compact growing types. This is a picture taken today under quite overcast and gloomy conditions with natural light and the colors are a little washed out. We'll have an updated picture of the cymbidium (Red Beauty hybrid) spike later in the week....it's growing quite nicely and starting to space the buds out.