The Thank You Stick That’s Not a Stick

Some time ago I helped my best friend by driving her to her colonoscopy.  In order to thank me for this small task in time, you may remember she gave me an orchid which over time, has taken up more time than the original driving favor.

This might be a great gift to most people—who aren’t afraid of killing a plant, who know what to do with a plant or have any qualifications at all for taking care of a particular and delicate plant.    That person is not me.    But I watered it, it did okay, the flowers fell off and I wrote a blog post about how I now had a stick to water every two weeks.

When I found out later that the blooms fell off any way and I didn’t do anything wrong, I was relieved.   But when would it have flowers again?   This was more confusing because most people I talked to (non-orchid people, otherwise known as my friends) said it was hard to say, the plants were unpredictable.

There were two flowers once, but there were more difficulties than successes and most of the time there was just a stick with two little leaves.    Recently, I went to a friend’s house who had orchids with no sticks.  I asked her about them and she told me about cutting the stick off once the flowers dropped, putting cinnamon paste on the cut section and that the plant would come around faster because it wasn’t dedicating nutrients to the old stalk.

I wasn’t sure.   I’d been complaining about that stick for so long now I would feel bad just cutting it off.   But my mother-in-law checked into it as well and found out all sorts of things to help the plant, including cutting off the old stalk, removing all the bad surface roots, cutting off damaged pieces of the leaves and sealing the edges of anything cut with a antibacterial spray, or when you didn’t have that, cinnamon paste would do.

So we did all that and she further went and cleaned off all the leaves with a homemade spray to make sure there was no bacteria growing on the leaves, something orchids are susceptible to.    Then we watered it and now I’m waiting.   It may take months for it to become, “un-shocked” but when it does, I hope there will be a new stick and flowers to go with it.

My best friend saw it the other day and said, “oh no, you cut off the stick!”  I was about to launch into the story of our research when somewhere between one to five children interrupted us.   I need to let her know I only maimed the Colonoscopy Thank You Plant in the hope of future good.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Zoo Adoption Story:   My children were asked by their Aunt A what their favorite animal was.  My daughter said a Hedgehog and my son said a Tiger.  For Christmas they got a stuffed animal to match.   Then, today, we got in the mail from the Palm Beach Zoo adoption papers to go with their stuffed animals.  My son has now helped adopt a tiger at the zoo named Beropi and my daughter has an adopted hedgehog named Faso.   Suffice it to say, they are both very excited and looking forward to going to Florida to visit their new friends at the zoo.