The bad news is that in the effort to flower, it dropped ALL of its leaves!

It was because I had tried to bring my compost indoors for the winter. Unfortunately, it was colonised by some type of fungus gnats. New ones hatched every day, and the apartement’s windows were covered with them. They were fairly benign, but I think that they would try to eat the houseplants near the windows:

While unsuccessful at feeding on the plants, the little bites became infected with bacteria or fungi, which caused small pockmarks of dead tissue to form on the leaves. Some of the orchids were heavily affected (particularly Beta’s and some of the oncidiums). Here’s a before and after series:

The happy ending (I guess) is that there is a new leaf growing (its beginnings can be seen in the last picture). Here the effects on a few other orchids.

Witchdoctor:

That is its last leaf. However, it has begun to form a new plant, but this one is at the end of one of the psuedobulbs, rather than at the base:

The beallara has been slowly growing two new plants (which were also hit by the infection):

And finally, this weekend is the Southern Ontario Orchid Society’s Orchid Show here in Toronto, will post some pictures!

Well, Sweet Sugar is still flowering. I tried to self-pollinate it’s flowers, but it seems that I’m not going to be able to fool it – each flower that I pollinated has (after first morphing shape a bit) faded after a few days to a week later.

Here it is in full glory:

Here’s a close up of an unpollinated flower, that hole is where the pollen is supposed to go:

In other news, I bought another orphan, this time a spider orchid (Brassia “Eternal Wind” Summer Dream – I think based on the flower, not labeled). I’ll post a picture once I get some batteries for the camera.

And finally, Beta’s Orchid (the second one I got) has initiated a flower spike. It’s a wee little one yet, but I’ll try to get a picture of it as well. So now I have successfully gotten two orchids to flower (cross my fingers on that phal).