Your Fertilizer Is Innocent. Your Water Isn't.

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]I bet you don't even know what this is.

[00:00:02]What is this?

[00:00:06]It's a pH meter. I was looking online for videos about pH and orchids and I can't really find many things and it's important. I have a crazy story for you.

[00:00:20]Get ready. Okay, so this is water from my hose. So, what you do is is you get your pH meter. You see it has a 14 on there.

[00:00:32]You put it in here. And you can see it starts to change.

[00:00:38]It says about 7.8.

[00:00:41]This is a really cheap pH meter, so I don't know that I trust it. It's probably 02. So, it's probably about eight. In in fact, I bet it's about eight. So, hold on. Okay. So I put four drops of this. I mean it probably reduced it dramatically. I mean normally I mean this is okay. So same thing. Put it in there.

[00:01:08]And you see how it's going down down down.

[00:01:14]Wow. 1.5 up two 1.7. So yeah, you can see how the pH down, which is acidic, dramatically reduce the water. Do not water your orchids with two. That that would burn them. That would hurt them. So I have a few vandas. When I say a few, probably I don't know, a hundred.

[00:01:39]Literally, I have so many vandas that I'm I'm done. No more vandas for Dave. I have enough. I'm tired of them. I have too many. But this is a story. This is a crazy I don't know. It's crazy for an orchid guy. It's crazy. So, I have all of these vandas. Everything I'm doing is right. I'm watering them every day. Uh they have good light. Uh the temperature is right. And I don't have a single bloom for a year. For a year, there's not a single bloom on these beautiful panda which should be just bursting with color. But they are not what is happening now. Granted, I moved about a year ago to my new place and so since then just no blooms at my old house is blooming like crazy.

[00:02:34]It's a mystery. It's a mystery that I finally figured out and it all has to do with pH. So, when I was at my last house, I was using reverse osmosis water, which is like perfectly even pH.

[00:02:51]It's right around seven. Now, 6 and a half to seven is what orchids like. And what that means is whenever you put fertilizer into water, if the pH is the correct pH, the plants are happy. they they get the fertilizer and the pH is correct and the plants are able to absorb the nutrients. That's very important. In order for a plant to absorb nutrients, it needs to have the correct pH.

[00:03:23]So, what happened? What did I figure out? This is what happened. I tested the pH of my wellwater. So, now I have well water. I am not using reverse osmosis water yet. I'm working on that. So, I'm working with well water, which I've never had before. This house is a little more in the country. So, I got this the pH meter that I showed you, and it was showing me about 8 and a half to nine pH. It's called basic pH. It's the opposite of acidic. So, that's unbelievably high. Unbelievably high.

[00:04:00]was can cause some real problems. And once I figured that out, the mystery was solved. All right, you ready? This is the mystery solved. So, vandas in order to bloom need phosphorus more so than other kinds of orchids. So, the basic nutrients are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Nitrogen is the growth nutrient. Phosphorus generally orchids don't need much, but it's what makes them bloom. Now, the problem is they're very phosphorus is very very icky about its pH. And when the pH is that high, 8.59, it's it's going to get blocked out, locked out. So even though you're spraying the fertilizer on the plant, because the water that's connected to the fertilizer is so basic, the plant doesn't get it. It's un able to absorb it. So you could have fertilizer that is just jam-packed of with phosphorus and be spraying it all over your vandas and they're not actually absorbing anything. So what ended up happening is my vandas weren't blooming because they weren't getting the very nutrient they needed in order to bloom. Mystery solved. Okay, I am going to put on the screen this chart that shows you what pH each particular nutrient requires.

[00:05:39]You can look at the chart if you want.

[00:05:40]It's going to look complicated. At the end of the day, you want like six to seven. If your pH is six to seven, everyone's happy. Everything's doing its thing. Anyway, look at the chart. Look at the chart. Enjoy. Be confused. Look it up in the internet.

[00:05:58]There are basically four kinds of water.

[00:06:02]You got your well water, which I just talked about in Florida. It's generally very basic. It's above seven. It's definitely not ideal. It's going to it's not ideal. The next kind is tap water.

[00:06:17]Something you would get out of a municipal system. Also not ideal. Not as high pH-wise. It might be like seven and a half. So, it should be fine. But there are some chemicals inside of tap water.

[00:06:30]Now, if you take tap water and you put it in a jug or whatever and you let it sit overnight, some of those chemicals kind of go to the bottom or dissipate.

[00:06:41]So, if you want to be that way, feel free. But tap water is not going to kill your orchids. It's just not ideal.

[00:06:49]Neither is well water. Now, the absolute perfect kind of water is rainwater.

[00:06:57]Imagine that. Now, I'm thinking about doing some sort of like rain barrel setup thing. I don't know how other people have recommended it. Rainwater is usually like six to 6.5.

[00:07:10]it makes sense, but rainwater is pretty ideal when it comes to pH and the orchids in general. And then the last would be reverse osmosis water.

[00:07:21]Again, it's literally perfectly pure water, which isn't always great. I'm going to talk about that now. Talk about it now. So, because not to get overly complicated here, because there is nothing in reverse osmosis water, it's very volatile. So, if you put in like a couple drops of lemon juice, it's going to drop the pH, boom, way low. And if you put in a drop, a couple drops of uh baking powder, it's going to boom, go real high. So, you have to be careful with that water.

[00:07:56]Generally, what a lot of these orchid growers do is they dump in a little bit of well water just to, you know, give it a buffer, just kind of chill everything out.

[00:08:06]Okay, long story short, rain water, great. Reverse osmosis, basically just as good. Tap water and well water, oh well, deal with it. Your orchids will be fine. Okay, so what did I do? Because, by the way, my vandas are now blooming and I'm pretty psyched. They're happy.

[00:08:24]Beautiful. I've been better about spraying for thris this year. I've been spraying every two two to four weeks.

[00:08:30]Separate video. Um, but my vandas, they started to bloom. It's like a miracle.

[00:08:37]So, what did I do? Well, I artificially acidified the water that I used to fertilize my plants with. Hold on, I'll show you.

[00:08:53]Okay, so what I did was this is the bucket of fertilizer. Imagine there's water in here. And this is something called pH down. pH down. It's basically acid. I really mild acid. So, I fill that with water. I take, I don't know, a tablespoon, it says on here. I put it in and my pH goes from like 8.5 down to six. I then put fertilizer in there. So, now I'm fertilizing with water that's pH6. So, I go over my van with my fertilizer and they're able to receive the phosphorus because the pH is correct. That's fancy. That is chemistry.

[00:09:40]So, again, I reduce the acidity. I know I've had a couple people come to me saying when I was at the other house with the reverse osmosis water and they'd come to my house and they'd be like, "Man, you really know how to grow orchids. Those vandas are amazing. I can't grow vandas like that." And I felt very fancy. I felt very, you know, my ego was getting blown up. But in hindsight, all that was happening was they were watering their plants with tap water and I was watering my plants with reverse osmosis water. So my vandas were receiving way more phosphorus, hence they were blooming. How cool is that?

[00:10:25]Here's another point. We're getting really technical here, but it is important. So, I have everything I have basically at this point is mounted or hanging in a basket. Uh, I don't know how well.

[00:10:40]So, you can see almost everything is hanging. And if you're wondering, Dave, what the heck are you standing in right now? This is the new LAI. Most of it's done. I wish I'd made it a little bit bigger.

[00:10:54]It's already full. Um anyway, so if you have a potted, right, if it's potted and you pour the acidic water, right? So, you get the fertilizer, the bucket of water, you put in that acid stuff, like I said, you get the pH at the right level, you put in the fertilizer, and you fertilize your plant that's in a pot, it's not going to work quite as well because the media in here has been soaked in alkaline water over and over and over and over. So the media itself is already quite alkaline and dumping some acidic fertilizer into that is not going to do that much because it's already too alkaline. Now if you look at a Vanda or something like that, it has no media. So when you water it, it just you water it and it dries and it's gone. So, on things that are mounted or in baskets with maybe no media or just charcoal or something, stuff that drains really, really fast.

[00:12:00]Um, it works. It works really well. Look at that beauty. This is a beauty.

[00:12:08]I don't know how well you get.

[00:12:11]I mean, it is massive.

[00:12:14]I will say I'll tell you what it is on the screen. It's probably my favorite orchid. It's gorgeous. It these flowers last forever. They're massive. They're on the other side, too. I don't think you can see them per se. Just wanted to show this off real quick.

[00:12:33]So, and somewhat let's do some conclusion, some concluding thoughts here.

[00:12:39]My flower bouquet here. So, what about different species and genuses of orchids like Dendrobium, Vanda, Catlia? Do they need different? Now, we're getting pretty specific here, but this is important. Do they need different pH for each one of these various genre? Right?

[00:12:59]And the answer is, thank goodness, no.

[00:13:04]Supposed to have different pH for each plant. Now, that that's just getting out of control. Uh, so yeah, like that five and a half to seven. They're happy as can be. I hope you learned a lot today.

[00:13:17]I bet you've never heard about this stuff before. And I hope it takes your I know it will. I'm excited. Your orchid game to the next level.