new to Orchids Forum

Hello everyone. My name is Greg and I am a 72 year-old retired (17 Jan. 2022) American music and English school teacher living in Chiang Mai Thailand for the last 3 years. I am remarried to a wonderful Thai lady and her entire Thai family has adopted me. The previous 4 years I lived and taught in Zhuhai China. I had to leave my beloved orchid collection behind in China (my Chinese landlord inherited the collection and is doing great with the plants).

I just recently started purchasing orchids again and have 6 beautiful orchids.

My interests include music, gardening/landscaping, and Milwaukee sports.

 

I started dealing with orchids in extremely cold ND. I had grow lights set up in the basement. Not the ideal place to work with orchids. But my entire house had 50 orchids (all types) on display nicely organized, and it looked great! But the cold winters and using furnace dry heat made it difficult, but I added humidifiers and I did pretty good with them. My beloved wife died in July 2014 and I became so depressed for the next 6 years. I retired from teaching until I moved to Zhuhai China. Luckily I had the orchids to occupy my time and thoughts in ND.

 

Marni, you are right. Thailand is a huge orchid producer in the world. But there are not that many places that sell online to individuals. Most of the Thai online sellers are huge corporate farms that sell their products internationally. Also, the Thai retailers that sell to individuals (the orchids have different names) and sell many noids and then there is a translation issue for me.

 

I see the name on Facebook. I rarely use Facebook but I will check it out. Thanks Marni. ChiangMai has a huge retail flower market (the largest flower market that I have ever seen). But between my bad arthritic lags and hips and covid still very active, we just haven't gone there yet.