| Let me share a little story from my earliest days of orchid growing:
I was once an out of control, enthusiastic newbie, I wanted to try everything there was to try, I wanted to know why my orchid hadn't grown this month and should I repot it or should I mount it or should I change it's fertilizer, would dividing spur more growth, etc., etc and I wanted to do it all and know it all right now. Every few months I was wondering if I should change something or wonder if what I was doing was havign an effect or not. i didn't have very many orchids at that time, maybe 12-15 or so.
A gentle but firm and very experienced fellow orchid society member finally essentially said to me (I'm paraphrasing a bit here), "Just stop messing with your orchid, leave them alone and let them do what they do. Watch them and see what they do, learn their growth/bloom cycles before trying to manipulate them."
It's one of the toughest orchid growing lessons to learn because it requires something I have very little of....patience. But in the long term, it is one of the best bits of orchid growing advice I have ever been given, just leave the thing alone and let it grow. Orchids do not need our constant fussing and fiddling.
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