What to do with a species that will not re-bloom in the area you live in?

[naokit]

Hybrid Cymbidiums are popular orchids (probably the most popular one) in Japan, and my parents had 3-500 of them. I haven't grown them recently, but I did take care of them when I was a kid (30 years ago). My uncle was a florist, and he brought left-over plants to our house. Most of them were neglected, but they did well without much care. As Wade mentioned, they respond well to fertilization. So when we occasionally decide to take care of them; repot them, and gave them fertilizer, we got rewarded with lots of flowers. We used organic solid fertilizer (Rapeseed bokashi), so it is difficult to translate the amount to Chemical fertilizer. But it is much more than any other orchids. Almost like potted non-orchid plants. Also they did better if we did daily water in the summer.

Does your plant make too many new growths? In Japan, we usually remove the excess growths, so the plant focus on making a few new fat growths per year. The idea is that if you let them mature too many pseudobulbs, the resources are too scattered around, and each doesn't become fat enough to initiate flower shoots in the fall. In the spring, you can remove the new growths except a couple biggest new growths. In the fall, they also make new growths. We remove the shoots which will become new pseudobulbs, and retain only flower shoots. It could be difficult to tell the difference between the leaf vs flower shoots, but flower shoots are rounder (less flat), and softer if you squeeze. I'm not sure if people in the US does this (and some people would think that it is silly to prevent the growths), but this is a common practice promoted for Cymbidium growing in Japan.

If you don't repot every couple years, the pot become completely filled up with roots (and really tough to repot). We had lots of plants which didn't get repotted for long time (like 10 years), but they can survive, but didn't flower well. So you probably should repot it if the pot is bulging. The issue is after repot, they can grow more roots, so they may also initiate too many pseudobulbs, too. So you probably need to follow the removal of the excess shoots to make them more focused.

[78Terp]

Thanks for your info!

I have heard how much they hate being repotted. My plan was to give it this blooming season to bloom and then repot. It has 3 new growths this season. At least 2 last year but that is ther year it fell several feet, got hailed on pretty badly. So that year the plant took a lot of unintentional abuse. This summer it only saw a slight bit of non-damaging hail.