What types of orchids should you grow? Well, it depends. What type of orchid business do you have, desire or wish to move toward? Many growers grow orchids for cut flowers, many are commercial potted plant growers, and others grow orchids for their personal pleasure and mold it into a business that not only keeps them busy, but also adds great satisfaction and a magical quality to their lives.

We like to raise a hefty amount of varieties for cut flower and potted plant growers but we also offer orchid seedlings that are destined for orchid aficionados. Why can't all the orchids be both for commercial growers and orchid greenhouses attending to the needs of avid hobbyists? Some people are interested in speed/profit and others are interested in the unfolding of uniqueness. So it turns out that in our finishing area, we grow a marriage of both.

Uniqueness does seem to take more time, particularly in orchid hybrids. Uniformity can come from clones or from specialized hybridizing which focuses on uniform progeny. The advantage for the commercial grower is having a crop he or she is familiar with and being able to better manage those particular cultivars. They become the staples that are the heart of his or her productivity. For our nursery and many Hawaii based orchid businesses, University of Hawaii cultivars provide a solid foundation of reliable and repeatable sexually reproduced cultivars that avoid the viral and mutation problems associated with mericlones.

But what about what cultivars to grow? That is a question that needs to take into account what grows well in your location and what your market is today and how it will evolve. Determining what varieties grow well in your area is dependent on your location for the most part and then what adaptations you have added to your orchid house to accommodate their cultural requirements. You may want to raise cultivars that you know grow well in your location and start expanding on similar types of orchids for the bulk of your production and trial new groups in smaller quantities to discover what else is possible.

Uniqueness is inherent in many hybrids. Hybrids offer a range of different floral possibilities from a group of siblings. The magical quality in raising orchids is realized from awakening to a new orchid never seen before. I have noticed that sometimes it's a small divergence of color that creates that wondrous sense of beauty that resonates so significantly for a particular individual. Orchid hybrids in their uniqueness seem to offer a personal connectivity, unless of course one is brainwashed into believing that beauty is something some Judge defined as such.

So how do we marry the uniform, highly productive orchid cultivars with the unique ones? I think we have found that in each market there exists a relatively proportional amount of desire for each type of orchid. We take the sum total of the market demand and use an ongoing formula that weighs the potential outcome of all the seedlings and matches it to the ongoing demand for product, taking into account the seasonal swings. It's a lot more complicated than it sounds. There are a multitude of components and variables to consider. But one consolation might be that it is much easier for you to manage your inventory than it is for me. We not only need to produce and provide a flow of blooming plants but also plants for seedling customers who can deplete particular groups or cultivars over another.

Being too heavily stocked in one particular color and deficient in another creates inventory imbalances. Ultimately we find that all the blooming plants somehow find their way to a new home. So why take time out to plan one's inventory if all the plants seems to sell anyway?

I think inventory planning becomes of great importance when one raises more clones than hybrids. It seems that huge runs of one clone can create gluts in the marketplace. Since the propensity to bloom all within a short time frame is greater in clones they need to be carefully managed to avoid overproduction that results in a poor market mix. Hybrids tend to bloom in a more continuous manner that seems to provide us with greater regularity and so we can focus on proportion of types and colors rather than specific cultivars.

The various categories that we have assigned to each dendrobium can be helpful in planning your inventory. Each group has a particular seasonality and also a relative range of productivity. The charts and graphs provide a brief synopsis of the normal expectations of each group in our particular Hawaiian climate. Other climates can experience significantly different outcomes so it is only intended as a point of reference.

Ideally, we like to grow particular percentages of types as well as color. These percentages will vary depending on your market. From our perspective, the world is expanding with a wonderfully diverse range of aficionados with a collective interest in everything possible. There are also market segments that seem to absorb classical cultivars year after year so providing a steady flow is essential.

Have you figured out your seasonal needs and also your percentages of colors for your ideal mix? The next step seems to be figuring out your production schedule for planting. Some grower's tend to crop (plant all at once), while growers in the tropics find it better to plant on an almost continuous basis. We have found that having a continuous flow of blooming plants that rises and falls with the market demand is as important as having good quality plants. How to create this scenario is the very basis of managing your orchid inventory.

Darrell Sugita, Grower and Breeder
Hawaiian Floral Nursery