Thank you for making this video! I bought this kind of orchid for the first time last year and it had one stalk with lots of flowers. I was very confused when it came around to this year with 5 new stalks shooting up and no flowers, but thanks to your video I know to just leave it alone and let it do its thing. Thank you!

Thanks for your help and flowering details

Thank you for this video! Great information

Hi, Geoff! Thank you for this very informative video! Happy growing! 😊

Here in Perth West Australia my dendrobiums are under shade cloth in coir baskets, and bloom every year. I also have many tied onto trees and branches, they do very well without much attention. Thanks for your tips.

Rick L is back to raising orchids

I haven't seen any IG posts or new videos for a while now, I hope that you are doing OK and you're just busy with summer.

The fully dry rest is, IME, not as important as eliminating feed and providing the temperature drop. We have had a wetter than normal winter and I got a nice blooming out of Den To My Kids and Den Stardust 'Firebird' despite the plants getting rained on numerous times over the winter. Certainly reducing water comparative to the growing season is advised, allowing the plants to get bone dry between waterings, but I don't think they need a long totally dry period. In order to get a better blooming, I will sacrifice a year of blooms and force the plant to continue growing through the winter. This allows the plant to produce more canes and, in doing so, store more energy for the next blooming period. Of course, this is only possible if light and temperature can be maintained to match the growing season.

So what would be the right medium for a nobile indoors, I have what was a large plant but hasn't bloomed for a couple of years, canes are a bit dry and has loads of aerial roots,what should I do?

Where is best to leave them for the temperature drop?

I know you won't believe me but orchids are seasonal bloomers. Ie all of them follow the 4 seasons of the year to flower. Nobiles flower in spring after winter - as long as they haven't been confused too much, this depends when they were bought. The best time to buy a nobile is in spring since they will always be sold with flowers on so spring time means they will acclimatize to our seasons best. I mention you won't believe me because all you ever hear is that phals are triggered to flower by giving them a drop in temperatures in autumn and nobiles need a cool down in winter and the same for so many other cooler growing dendrobiums. This is just completely false. But long time experienced orchid growers aren't bothered correcting people that get this wrong. I've mostly given up correcting people too because as I already mentioned they never believe us anyway and even if we manage to convince 1 in 100 growers there will still be 99 parroting on that temperatures are important. The fact remains all orchids are seasonal. Phals generally spike in autumn when the sun light hours reduce and the temperatures drop. Has nothing to do with the drop in temperatures. I have performed several trials to confirm this and every year I repeat my trials but nobody is interested. It's like magic tricks. Everyone is awed by the magic. Then you get people that figure out how the magic trick is performed and some people do like to find out how the trick is performed but compared to the magician, the person revealing the secret never gets the same 'wow' reaction as the magician performing the trick. In the same way new orchid growers are wowed by the flowers and are happy to believe phals and dendrobiums need a cool down in order to flower but the person coming along to reveal how the magic is actually done in the orchid world just gets ignored or most often not believed cause if 99 say its temperature related cause that is all they have heard then the 1 person saying otherwise must be wrong. Temperatures are important for orchids. The orchids will not flower if temperatures are too high or too low for any particular species. They all have a range they will grow well in and flower well in. For dendrobium nobiles being cool growers it is important they don't get grown too hot in winter. But cooling them down is really not as important as it is made out to be. I will admit my nobiles got too big for my grow space and I have far too many orchids so I don't grow them anymore but I did grow them for 6 years and they always flowered beautifully being grown down to 16 degrees in winter. The trick is not to keep them hot. That is all. I know people that flowered them at 20 degrees just fine too. Phals flower best in a temperature range below 26 degrees C. They will grow well above 26 degrees but flowering will be affected if kept too much above 26 degrees. Again that is it, if a phal is grown at 20 degrees then cooling it down further will achieve absolutely nothing more. As a last note I will also add that I kept watering my nobiles all through winter as an experiement and they actualy flowered better than keeping them dry. It takes years, probably decades for most average growers to ever figure this out - and they must be willing to have the desire to figure it out also. Most youtubers are not that patient, read how it's done from a guide online and parrot on what they learnt like that. I really don't blame you, which youtuber ever gets it right? All they would achieve is a lot of downvotes from people that think they know it all having read a few online guides on the subject. And again I even realize you will dismiss this comment and say well it might be but who cares, I got my likes and to prove what tom is saying would take me a decade. No worries but I will still mention it and hopefully in 100 years or so people will have gotten it right. When it comes to orchids, nothing that is discovered about them happens overnight, we've only been growing them for just over 100 years, the books written in the 60's will invariably have gotten things wrong a bit because LED lights didn't even exist back then and most other orchid books on the subject since use old books as references so the same information will continue for many more decades but eventually with LED lighting far more available it is very easy to confirm what I am saying. Since all orchids are seasonal, one just has to grow them under LED lighting and change the light hours throughout the year to replicate the 4 seasons while keeping them warm. Or watch how people grow the cool growing orchids over in jamaica. That is how I figured out that there must be more to it originally actually. Like the dendrobium lindleyii flowers beautifully in a hot climate in jamaica too. It is a cool grower - what this means is not that it needs a cool temperature, all it means is that it can tolerate a cool temperature. So me living in a cool UK climate could flower them but once I copied jamaican temperatures my plant flowered 3 times better in fact. This made me question everything I had been told before. It's fascinating how many wrong notions we still have about orchids. They have been growing in nature for millions of years, we have only been cultivating them for a fraction of that time ourselves.