Destroy Pests on Your Orchid Plants with A Good Cleaning

The orchid plant's natural enemies include insects and other small creatures. The possible threats are many, but the main ones are red spiders, thrips, cockroaches and ants.

To grow orchids successfully, you must take measures to defeat these pests before they can damage your plants. There are specific ways to deal with each kind of pest. Attention to cleanliness will do the most toward defending your plants from pests.

All efforts of agriculture controls notwithstanding, some imported plants will bring pests with them.On the other hand, even orchids from the best nurseries can have pests on them, too.

A good practice is to make a thorough examination of every new plant before you allow it to enter your home. Before anything else, you should destroy every pest that you can find by visual inspection. If you don. Of course, these pests can and will destroy the flowers as well. This can be really frustrating to an orchid owner who has lavished care and expense on a plant.

If you already have orchids in your home or garden or greenhouse, you should treat every new orchid arrival with suspicion. Put it in "isolation" for a week or so. If you fnd insects on it, you should rid it entirely of them.

Washing all leaves, roots and bulbs on an orchid will leave little opportunity for any pests to escape destruction. The best method is to thoroughly clean the bulbs and leaves. Shake the plant out of the pot, cut away all decayed roots, wash the sound roots in clean water and then re-pot in clean containers using new material.

If executed efficiently, this is a sure means of eliminating those pests that a novice orchid grower would need to search closely for to see. A few common pests might be seen in the form of eggs. Others appear as young insects but are so minute that you need a magnifying glass to find them in the foliage. Cleaning your plants, though, will wash away all traces of orchid pests, including the ones you can't see.

A good guide to orchid growing will have many more tips and suggestions for making sure that a pest doesn't put an end to your prized plants. The most thorough guide to today's orchid care, in my opinion, is Orchid Care Expert by Nigel Howard, which can be downloaded from the Internet. Mr. Howard's ebook is a complete course in itself, suitable for novices as well as the more experienced. Also, visit the Orchid Secrets web site, which has a growing database of information on all aspects of orchid cultivation.