New spike discovered

I have several noId phals from the times when I had no idea about all the orchid species beyond the ones sold at the grocery stores.
They are still potted into their old clear plastic pots with old cheap Shultz bark mix, I don't fuss with them much, water every couple weeks when don't forget and surprisingly they are growing and regularly blooming.
One of them started a new spike:



Even though it is not as exciting as have some fancy novelty hybrid spiking, but still I will have some blooms and it is always nice.

Here is the plant itself:



I think probably keeping it in the basement could have helped with triggering the spike.

V. coerulea x C. vietnamica

I was watering my recently acquired cross of Vanda coerulea and Christensonia vietnamica and noticed two little nubbings of new roots.

One is smaller:



The other one is a bit bigger:



When I have a plant with almost no roots, seeing such new growths makes me as happy as seeing the blooms.

Phal. cornucervi 'red' x Tsay's Evergreen spike

It looks like the newest spike that was stalled on the cross of red cornu-cervi and Tsay's Evergreen did grow a little bit.
I was looking at old picture from its arrival and comparing to today's - spike did grow:



Of course it is still far from creating a bud yet:



I also noticed two new fat roots along the stem and increased size of the newest leaf.
All in all it is adjusting well and maybe I will see the bloom some time soon - have no idea how it will look though.

Seaweed extract

There is a lot of talk about wonders that seaweed extract does to orchids.
At some point when I read about it for the first time, I searched our stores and found some liquid product at Rona that you supposed to spray all over the foliage:



Excided and happy I picked the first victim - old noId phal to test the product. After first squeeze I was ready to throw up, the stink was undescribeable(this word doesn't look right), but phal didn't mind.
Dedicated to my orchids, I put a mask over my nose and sprayed them all in the powder room, which could not be used for a while because of that dreadfull smell.
I never repeated the treatment, but occasionally looked through the stores to see if there are alternative products to try.
Couple weeks ago I came across the Home Hardware website, searched for seaweed extract and something came up. It is a dried seaweed, that you mix in water used for watering plants:



Of course I decided to try that one too.
Instructions say to dissolve content of the package (30 g) in the gallon of warm water and then use the resulted mixture as concentrate to add to water in proportions of 3 tsp to one liter of water.
The 3.78 L orange juice jug was promptly bought and emptied. It will be a convenient storage for the concentrate.
Black stuff in the package appeared to be some pressed sticky substance (I was expecting the powder)but at least it didn't have that strong stink, just slight sushi smell. It dissolved easily in the warm tap water and made the water look dark brownish black.
Concentrate supposed to be kept in cool place, so I took it down to the basement, standing on the concrete floor it should feel pretty cool. Hope it doesn't become stinky with time.
Next watering I will start using it and wait for wonders...

Did anybody use any of those? Were there any results? Did you find other types of seaweed extract?

Paphiopedilum Delrosi 'Murrey'

This roth cross is still alive and I am very proud of it.



Since the time I won Paphiopedilum Delrosi 'Murrey' on the SlipperTalk auction and got here, it did shed one old leaf, grew a new leaf that was started already, survived the spider mites attack and now I detected the start of another leaf:



It arrived potted into plastic pot, but I am not very good with plastic pots when they are over 2 1/2 inch, so I moved my plant into my usual clay pot with chc and it seems delrosi didn't mind.

Although right now it lives in the basement with my parvisepalums, I think it might have to be moved when winter comes. Cross of rothschildianum and delenatii it is probably better off in the warmer spot.