Stuff You Should Know - How Orchids Work

Episode Date: January 2, 2018

Ever since Victorian orchid hunters ravaged the tropics in search of unique specimens to sell for ludicrous amounts of money, the West has been gripped by orchidelirium. Small wonder since orchids are not only beautiful, they’re among the most interesting plants on Earth. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry Rowland back again with us,

and everything is back to normal. I can stop trembling and foaming at the mouth like little Danny in The Shining when he was all freaked out. What are you talking about? You know what I'm talking about. Remember when Danny's just sitting there zoned out, like seeing, I think, the blood coming out of the elevator?

Well, no, I know that. Down at the lobby? Why are you doing that right now? Because Jerry wasn't around for a while. Oh, okay. Remember, we had guest producer Noel, who's great, but he's not Jerry. No, I mean, Jerry is a lovely person inside and out,

and Noel looks like somebody that might be following you around a parking lot in a trench coat. And sometimes does, but is beautiful inside. Yeah, and under the trench coat. I'm just kidding, Noel. So Orchids is what we're talking about today, Chuck. Yeah, how you doing? I'm doing good.

I'm feeling like nice and mellow because I just, I research orchids all morning. You huff some orchids? I snorted the orchids. This in real time, just so that people know, is our last recording of the year. How's that for a brain buster because it's coming out in the new year?

Yeah, because we like to take it easy in December. That's annual stuff you should know tradition, is mellow December. One month, Chuck, we were one December, we closed down almost for like the entire month, do you remember? It was great, and hey. I think we recorded on like December 2nd and 3rd,

and then that was it until like the beginning of January. Yeah, we love doing this, and we love our job, but like any job, it is also very nice to not do it for a few weeks. It's like those cocktail weenies you might encounter at a Christmas party or a holiday party this year. You eat like a pound and a half of them, you're doing fine, but you have two pounds of them,

and you're like, I need to take a break for a couple minutes, it's just like that. I just made those for my holiday party. I love those, Chuck. I made them with, I did the Martha Stewart recipe. No way. It's slightly fancier than your run-of-the-mill recipe. What?

So. Did she do to those to make them fancy? Well, use like a phyllo, like puff pastry dough, instead of your standard thing. Okay, yeah, yeah. So that's a little different than what I'm talking about, but what else? Well, nothing, you know, you roll up the little smokies,

you brush the inside with a little like honey mustard, roll up the little smokies, and then you brush the top with egg, because that's how you get a scrambled egg, because that's how you get that good golden brown, and then I dusted mine with a little Rosemary, sea salt, and sesame seed, and then you bake them up, cut them into thirds, and throw them in.

I bought my first chafing dish of my life. You have a chafing dish? No, you got me beat. I have a crock pot that doubles as a chafing dish. It's the best I can come up with. Poor man's chafing dish. Yeah, I guess so. I was way more excited than a middle-aged man

should be about his first chafing dish, I gotta say that. No, it is pretty impressive. Is it scalloped like the edges and all that? Is it ornate, or is it like modern and clean? No, it's like the stainless steel oval. It's not square, or like, it's not a two-banger, it's just, you know, I threw my sausage balls

and my pigs in a blanket, both in there together, because it's all pork. I actually, I think the little smokies were beef. Now that I think about it. Oh, God. But it kept it hot all night long, you know? That's great. Well, that's what a chafing dish is supposed to do.

I know, but in years past, I would just put out the hot stuff and say, well, eat it now, or in 30 minutes, you can eat it cold when you're good and drunk. And if you got any complaints, get out. That's what you're famous for saying at your Christmas parties. I know.

So Chuck, what you've just described is delicious. I'm talking about, you know, if you just took those smokies and put them in like a delicious sauce? Oh, that old trick. Yeah, I mean, I'll eat what you're making every day of the week, but these things are like, that's like manna from heaven. That tangy, what is it?

It's not just barbecue sauce, it's sort of like, I don't know, some mystery gravy. It's got a little something extra in it. Martha Stewart probably knows. Well, I did sort of the dry version because there's also the sausage balls that you can have floating in that stuff too. I'll eat those too, that's fine with me.

I think it's mostly the sauce. You could put anything in there and I'll eat it. Yeah, I did the dry pig in a blanket and then the dry kind of the bisquick cheddar country sausage balls. Yep. Man, Chuck, you were killing it this year. Which by the way, are good for breakfast with eggs

for the next like three days. I know, that's one of the great things about throwing a holiday party or really any party, but a holiday party because there's usually a great spread is the next day you get to just chow down. Yeah, but it's weird because literally for dinner, I've been eating like blue cheese and prosciutto and sugar cookies and bourbon.

Man, that's what they call the holidays. Anyway. So orchids, man. Orchids. Hey, do you have any orchids? No, but I am a big, big orchid fan. Okay. I don't own them because I don't want to kill them. That's how much I love orchids is I don't want them

in my home because I will kill them dead. You're gonna love this episode then because my friend, I was once where you are and now I am an orchid-raising fool. Oh, really? Yeah, I've got six orchids and I'm not kidding. Four of them right now have- Or plastic.

Flowers, flowers stem shooting up. Wow. Yes. Did you raise them from pups? No, no. I mean, they were like cuttings. Yeah. So here's the thing.

When I bought them, they were in bloom. Like when everyone buys an orchid. Well, they should be. It's in bloom, right? Yeah, and that's actually a good rule of thumb as we'll find out, but everyone buys an orchid in bloom. And then the orchid goes out of bloom.

The flower dies away and you're like, well, that's it for the orchid and you throw it into the trash. No. No, but I mean, have you ever heard of anybody getting it to flower again? I hadn't and now I'm one of those people who has done that. Now, I didn't know, I don't know much about them. I just know that I go to every orchid show or exhibit

in its city if they have one and I'm there. Okay, so listen to this. It's really, really simple. You go out and buy an orchid, bring it home. And wait, yeah, you want it in bloom. And then once it stops blooming, it's going to, you're gonna be, again, you're gonna be tempted to just throw it away.

You'll say, what use are you to anyone now? But it's still a live plant. So at this point, you're gonna commit to repotting it. And you can probably reuse the pot it came in, a nice plastic pot that has lots of holes in it. And you're gonna take, you're gonna pull off that moss that it came with. That probably came with sphagnum moss.

You're gonna pull that off because it's really tough to work with if you're a novice. And then you're going to put that, just the roots of the orchid back into the pot with nothing in it. And then you're gonna fill it in with wood chips. Orchid potting mix wood chips. And you're gonna put enough in there to stabilize the orchid

and it'll grow more and more stable as it gets back used to its pot again. But that's what you, you want to switch out the moss for the wood chips. You want to water them once a week. And you want to fertilize them about once a week too. So on say Saturday, you water them. And then on Sunday,

you water them with a little fertilizer. You do that once a week while they're in their growth pattern or they're growing and they're not dormant. And you will have happy orchids. I promise you, it's way easier than you think. Well, I didn't think it was not easy. I just, an orchid once it loses its leaves or its flower

is just a sad vine twisty tide to a chopstick. Right. You want to get rid of the chopstick because it's a depressing reminder of what once was. It's true. But you want to hang on to it because you're going to get that thing to flower again. If you take it like the orchid just challenged you

to see if you could get it to flower again, it makes it a fun little game. Right, looking to your nemesis. Yeah, that's one way to look at it. Your nemesis or like a friend in need, one of the two. Yeah, but an orchid should not pick a fight with me because I could choke the life out of that skinny little thing. You could.

So fast. All right. So this whole discussion about orchids, right? And the fact that like you can go buy them anywhere you want from one big box store to another big box store, take your pick. Sure. You can find them at every single nursery

just about anywhere in the world. They live in nature on six continents. But all of the fact that they're so ubiquitous and they're so cheap has to do with basically England's entrance into an orchid craze in the Victorian era. Yeah, orchid mania in the mid 19th century, England would send orchid hunters all over the world

to plunder these exotic flowers from Central and South America. That sounds like 19th century England. Yeah, to the point where a lot of these were named after these plunderers or orchid hunters, which is kind of stinks when you think about it because I'm sure they already had great names in South America. They didn't just say, hey, future to be named flower,

flower to be named later after English white man. They had great names, I bet. But so they went down there and they would brag about this one guy, Frederick Sanders. Frederick Sanders, he was the royal orchid grower of Queen Victoria's England. And he would, you know, he would write home and brag, like, trust me, there's no more orchids left.

I got them all. Yeah, but he was actually probably not too far off because there's a lot, a lot, a lot of different orchid varieties. I think there's like something, I saw 20,000, I saw 25,000, I've seen as high as 30,000 species of orchids around the world. There's 200,000 hybrid versions

since humans came into the picture. But there's not necessarily that many orchids for each species. So these orchid hunters were going and finding these things that were basically considered one of a kind flowers. As far as anyone back in England was concerned, there was no other flower that anybody they knew had ever seen that looked like this, right?

So these were enormous status symbols and they fetched tens of thousands of dollars sometimes in mid 19th century British money, not today's money. So they were basically like, you had to be royalty to own orchids at first when they first started bringing them back to the UK. Yeah, and how crappy is it that they wouldn't go down there and be like, boy, these are beautiful and amazing.

Like, here, we're gonna take some and learn how to propagate these and you keep the rest. You're like, okay, we're taking all these. Thank you. Yeah, and let me just set your village on fire for good measure on my way out of town. Oh, God. So that's how the orchid craze started out.

And there's this pretty good article by Michael Polin, the famous omnivores dilemma author. He wrote this back in like 2009 called Love and Lies. And it's just basically him just waxing flowery about how great orchids are and how deceptive they are and all the different ways they have of tricking other animals into pollinating them. But one of the points he makes,

which is actually kind of legitimate, that not only have like all these bees and wasps and other animals that are tricked into pollinating orchids for various reasons. Yeah, not only have they fallen under the orchid spell, probably the most successful thing orchids ever did was to manage to beguile humans because we've taken them and propagated them

all over the world. And now they've come down from tens of thousands of dollars and, you know, or tens of thousands of pounds, I should say, in mid 19th century pounds to what, 10, 20 bucks depending on the size of the orchid. And you can get it just about anywhere. And that's all because of humans. You can get an orchid out of a bubblegum machine these days.

You can, very specialized one, but you can. Well, let's take a break here because I'm pretty excited. And I need to settle down. OK. And then we'll come back and talk about why we love these things so much right after this. MUSIC On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's vapor, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

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All right, so why humans love orchids, part one? Besides the fact that they look just amazing to the eye, and they're so delicate, but also very hearty, they're symmetrical. They have bilateral symmetry, and the science has proven that symmetry is attractive in humans. I know we've talked before about the fact that people whose faces are more symmetrical

or biologically more attractive than people like me, which have, you know, my face is all over the place. One side, I don't know what the other side's doing at any time. Sure, and yeah, with bilateral symmetry, it's like one half is mirror image of the other half. And there's not that many flowers in nature that have bilateral symmetry, right? So that's a pretty good initial theory.

Yeah, and I mean, I don't think people even realize that maybe what's going on subconsciously when they look at an orchid and revel in its beauty, that's one of the things you're just, you're not even maybe noticing, you know what I'm saying? Sure, it's subliminal or subconscious. Yeah. Close enough?

Close enough. So another theory is that they look quite vaginal in nature. A lot of them do. Especially some of the most common ones like phalanopsis have this, well, at the very least, you can say Giorgio Keefe definitely saw it, right? Yeah, and clearly throughout history, the Greeks, and you're not the first one to say that,

like they have often been thought of as aphrodisiacs, and part of that reason is from the way they look. Right, and actually, it's just so plainly obvious that during that orchid craze in Victorian England, which is also called orchid delirium, orchid delirium, I think, it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but there were people who were roundly opposed to that whole craze because of the over sexuality

that orchid flowers broadcast. The most lurid flower. Yeah, yeah. Because you know, you'd catch like the town weirdo in like your greenhouse. Hey, hey, that's all you need to say. Right. Get out of there.

Get out of there and roll. Exactly. You just turn the pump hose on them. Oh. So there's another whole kind of over sexuality to the whole thing too, and just the name of orchids is, I think, Latin or Greek. Do you remember which one?

I don't remember. It's either Latin or Greek for, it's Greek, for testicle. Yeah. Orchid, the word, and it refers to the shape of the bulb, the orchid bulb. I guess so. So people have been looking at orchids and thinking very impure thoughts about flowers

for a very long time. So this isn't just me. This isn't just Uncle Josh getting weird on you. I'm following in a long tradition of, and actually I'm not even doing anything myself. I'm just recounting. I'm reporting what other people have said before. Yeah.

You just have a large collection of orchids and Georgia O'Keeffe paintings and a trench coat. It's a very normal habit for a middle-aged man to suddenly get into. It's actually really relaxing, though. It's cool just to care for them. Oh, yeah. Well, like I said, they're very delicate,

but they're incredibly hearty, which is kind of one of the cool things. And they come in like you can't just describe an orchid, like this article says. That's like trying to describe what's normal about any human being. There are so many varieties, and they all look so different. And they're all manner of shapes and sizes and colors,

even though supposedly not a true black or true blue, even though you will see some that you will say, well, that's blue or black, it's really not. Right. Whatever true means. Which means that there's some orchid fans out there who are trying to propagate true black and true blue orchids right now.

Yeah, they're really like deep purples, usually variations of purple, which is fine. They look great. Sure, I'm not knocking it. Thanks for coming out. So despite the fact that there are so many different shapes, sizes, colors, they do all sorts of different stuff, they live in different places, people

have attempted to kind of broadly classify orchids. One of the first ways they do it is from their growth habit, and that you can divide orchids into two types from their monopodial, which is if you're at one of those big box home stores. Yes. I'm not buzz marketing, man. I'm not going to do it.

You're probably going to find phallinopsis, because they're the easiest ones to care for. They're the least fussy. They're the ones that most people are familiar with. But apparently, they're the least common out in the wild. But they have an upright growth pattern, where they have a single stem with leaves on either side of the stem, growing opposite one another.

And they shoot out a flower stem from the top part of the bottom pair of leaves. Correct. And then on the other side, you have the more common one, which is the sympodial. And these are beautiful. These are the ones that grow horizontally. And they send out their shoots through the old rhizome.

And the leaves and flower scapes at that point form at the top of the new shoots. Right. So one that grows from a horizontal rhizome to one that grows upright vertically like you would think of a typical plant. That's basically the two ways that an orchid's going to grow as a plant.

Another way that they classify them, too, is where they live. Because there are some types of orchids that grow like what you would consider a normal plant, out of soil. Some grow out of leaf litter. Those are called terrestrial orchids. Yeah.

Then there's the kind that you typically think of grow on like trees or on plants or where a branch meets like a tree. Yeah. On the actual trunk, the bark of a tree. Those are called epiphytes. And then lastly, there's lithophytes, which grow on rocks, but basically do the same thing that the ones that grow on trees

do, which is they're harvesting nutrients from the decomposing litter that accumulates in the grooves of the tree bark or where the elbow of the branch hits the tree trunk. All the stuff that accumulates there, the roots of the orchid are just sucking that stuff up. Yeah. But so it's not like stealing nutrients

from the thing that it grows on. Yeah. They're not parasitic. And I thought it was great that this article went to the trouble of making that point. For sure. So they don't have a parasitic relationship with trees. They do have a symbiotic relationship with fungus,

actually. So much so that they can't survive the first few stages of their life cycle without a specific type of fungus. Basically, acting as a nursemaid for the seed and the young plant as it's growing. Yeah. I mean, if you have a lot of time and a lot of patience

and a lot of orchid wherewithal, you can try to grow these from seed. But it can take a decade to get a flower from seed. And that's if the thing lives. Orchid seeds are so tiny, they're called dust seeds. And how they propagate is there need to be millions of these dispersed in order to get orchids to grow at all.

Right. And so if it's an epiphyte that grows, it's a variety that grows on tree bark, this seed has to get carried away from the mother plant. All the way over to some other tree, land in just the right place on that tree bark. And then there has to be the certain type of fungus that it has the symbiotic relationship with,

that it can grow into the seed and feed it nutrients while the seed is developing and germinating. That has to happen. It doesn't happen very often, which is why orchids are known for sending, like you said, millions and millions of seeds just out there into the ether and hoping that something sticks. It's like the orchid's way of throwing spaghetti at the wall.

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that they did not go bye-bye and that they've been around for 80 million years. I know. And one of the things that Michael Pollan article is so great about this, it's saying they're so maladapted in some ways that they've had to get really creative in other ways and to ensure their survival.

Like for example, an orchid, they have pollen, right? They're pollinating flowering plants, right? But when you normally think of pollen, you think of the yellow stuff, that powdery spores that just hit the wind and they just cover everything. Like everything's covered in yellow plant sperm basically is what it is, right? Gross.

So but it's true. So with an orchid, they have something called polinia. And polinia are, they're sacks of pollen, but they're not like the powdery kind. They're like about the size of a little grain of wheat. And in an orchid flower, you have the reproductive column. It has the female reproductive parts and the male reproductive parts all in the same place, right?

That's right, it's a party. Somewhere in there, there's that polinia. And one way or another, which we'll get into, that polinia has to get out of that orchid through no mechanism of its own and go way, way, way far away to another orchid and pollinate with an orchid that is in no way related to that orchid so that you can have, it's just more fitness basically

for the offspring, right? And then that polinia has to go pollinate that reproductive column of that other one and then the seeds start to grow. And then you have to broadcast the seeds. And so to do this, because they don't have polin that is easily transmitted, they've figured out how to trick bugs usually into pollinating for them

or spreading their pollen for them. So like for example, the... Some of these are amazing. Ophyrus epiphera, you take that one. The prostitute orchid or the bee orchid. This one is, oh, these are amazing, like how they've adapted to ensure their survival is just really something else.

So this one copies the scent and the looks of female bee reproductive parts. From behind. Yeah, like that's the cleanest way we can say it in order to attract the males. Like it looks and smells like a lady bee vagina. Yes, like there's a female bee in the flower already and the male bee's like, oh, OK, hey, how's it going?

I'm going to go see how you are. Exactly. Tries to, well, I guess, assault is the best way to put it. The female bee who he thinks is already in the flower, but it turns out actually is the flower. Yes. And while he's getting increasingly frustrated

but trying to do his thing, the polinia detaches from the flower's reproductive column onto the bee. The bee flies off, finally he's like, forget it, I'm out of here. It finds another flower eventually and is duped and does the same thing. And when he does, that polinia is then transferred to that flower's reproductive column and pollination takes place.

Amazing. It is amazing because not only does it look exactly like that bee, but it also puts out the same pheromones as the female of that bee. That's natural selection at its finest. All right, here's one. The dendrobium senes, not the gary senes. Let's say, yeah, that's a different one.

Maybe gary senes' great-great-great uncle was an orchid hunter. Maybe in China. Yeah, maybe. Because it's possible, because this is a Chinese orchid. And this one is pollinated by hornets, very specifically. And hornets like bees, bees do not like hornets. So this flower imitates the pheromones of bee fear.

And so the hornets like, hey, I think there's a bee over there that's scared of me. Let me go kill it. Or let me go do whatever hornets do to bees. What do they do? They kill them? I think they sting them. Do they sting them?

Or do hornets bite? Now, hornets sting. They sting, yeah. Yeah, they sting. And so it lures it over there because they think there's a scared bee. And in fact, there is nothing there. But the orchid going, welcome hornet.

Leave your junk here. Right. And he does. Or he picks up the polinian, does the same thing to another flower. That's right. So and then one of the things that Pauline pointed out, Michael Pauline pointed out was.

You said Poland early. You're not saying Poland. Which one is it? Well, I just think subliminally you're thinking bee pollen. So yeah, but which one is it? Do you know how to pronounce his name correctly? No. Pauline.

We'll just say that just to keep it from getting confusing. So what Michael Pauline pointed out was that if you look at the types of orchids, like the Orphus epiphera, if you look at the same orchids from the same variety, they're slightly different. So it's clearly, it looks like the bee from behind. And the pheromones that they're putting out are the same as well.

But they're slightly different. And they're just different enough so that bees don't learn to just avoid those flowers because they're being tricked every time. Yeah. So it's just different enough so that the bees can't learn that. I just think that's fascinating. Well, here did you read that Darwin article I sent you?

Did you send me one? I didn't get it. Oh, maybe I didn't send this one. Sorry. Yeah, you didn't send it. It's OK, but tell me about it. It's called Moth Tongs, Orchids, and Darwin, the Predictive Power of Evolution.

And basically back in the day, 1862, a British orchid grower sent Darwin some orchids from Madagascar and said, look at these things. Aren't they amazing? They have a nectaree, which is like a foot long. And Darwin's like, he writes back, he wrote to a friend at Q Gardens, KEW, which is a wonderful, wonderful public garden

in London, which I went to with Emily. And they had a quite an orchid collection there, of course, because they raided the world for years. And he wrote and said, in Madagascar, there must be moths with a proboscis capable of extension to a length between 10 and 11 inches, because that's the only explanation here. Well, yeah, and he was defending his new theory

of natural selection. Well, in co-evolution specifically. So he posited, these things are co-evolving. And only that, he literally predicted this new species that no one had ever seen before. As it turns out, there is a moth. In 1907, 20 years after Darwin died, subspecies of the gigantic Congo moth from Madagascar

was identified that had this long proboscis, like 12 inches long. And they were like, hey, this has got to be the thing. Like, I think Darwin was right. But it wasn't until 1992, about 100 years later, that they finally literally observed on camera this moth feeding the flower. And Darwin was like, from his grave, told you so.

Yeah, he said, booyah. How about that? Like 130 years after he first suggested this, was all proved out. That is pretty cool. That's awesome. That Darwin, he was a heck of a guy. He's kind of smart, you know?

Yeah, he was a little smarter. I've got one more. And this is just so, remember, we said there's 25,000 species. Yeah, we're not going to go through them all. No, no. I want to go over one more, though, called boba phylum bakari.

And its pollination is aided by flies and carrion beetles. And what attracts carrion beetles and flies? Well, rotting flesh, because it's where flies feed and that's where they lay their eggs that turn into maggots, right? So the flower puts out the smell of rotting meat. How about that? To attract the specific type of pollinator

so that it can be pollinated. That's just insane. All right, you want to take another break? Yeah. All right, we're going to take another break and come back and talk a little bit about the fact that vanilla is an orchid and other amazing facts. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up

sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

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All right, so vanilla is an orchid. Moving on. That was an amazing fact, Chuck. It is an amazing fact. Like, who knew? I mean, a lot of people know, but I didn't know. The flavoring is, um, it's the seeds. Yeah, it's the vanilla bean.

Obviously, it's not like they grind up those sweet petals of the flower. Yeah, but it's not even the outside of the bean. It's the little tiny seeds inside. That's where the vanilla flavor comes from. There's this fascinating anecdote. I can't remember the gist of it, but it's in that book, The Dorito Effect, that I talked about before,

where he was talking about the origin of imitation vanilla and how that just changed the world, basically. Apparently, the vanilla market was crashing when somebody came in at just the right time. And propped it up? Yeah, propped it up with the imitation vanilla. But go, again, go check that book out. It's amazing.

I will. Are you talking to me or everyone else? Both. So let's talk about some, let's talk about how to care for an orchid. Just in case anybody said, you know what, I'm going to go to my local big box retailer. Even better, I'm going to go to my locally owned mom and pop

nursery and buy an orchid today. My local orchidery. Yeah. This is what you want to look for. OK. Well, first of all, when you look at the orchid itself, it might give you a few clues as to what it needs care-wise. Right off the bat.

And these are broad. I mean, if you're an expert, obviously, you know a lot about it. But these are just some kind of broad things to look for. But it doesn't have many leaves. Or if the leaves are kind of leathery, then it probably needs more light than maybe another variety. Yes.

And if the leaves are limp and soft, it probably maybe is a little light sensitive. And maybe you don't throw it on your sun deck. Yeah. And you should probably ask the person you're buying the orchid from. Oh, yeah. Do all that.

Don't listen to us and expect to walk away with complete knowledge. Yeah. So again, you're probably going to find, if you look in the potting medium, there are terrestrial orchids. But I've never seen one in real life. I've only read about them on the internet. Have you ever seen an orchid in soil and dirt?

I've just read about it in legend. Right. Legend of lore. Same here. Same here. I've always seen them in sphagnum moss or something like that. You can also find it in coconut husk fiber or just all.

Apparently styrofoam beads work just fine because the point is the orchid isn't getting any of its nutrients or getting very, very little of its nutrients from the growing medium, which is why you need to fertilize it like basically weekly because that's where it's going to get its nutrients from. So the growing medium matters in that what you're doing is providing a lot of aeration for the roots

of the orchid, which since they don't grow underground, they're exposed to air and light and all that stuff, which is totally fine, but that means you don't want to cover them up too much with the growing medium. You want to let them run free. And so that's the purpose of the growing medium itself. Yeah, you don't want to grow an orchid in a rubber bladder full of red clay.

That's a dead orchid. Those fleshy roots that you see, they have these white cells that they're covered with called vellumine, and they're just sponges that absorb all the nutrients and all the water. And it's also a coating that helps protect moisture loss from heat, even though they generally like light and they like warm environments.

They are sort of delicate. You don't want to bake them in the hot Georgia sun all day. Now, there are very few orchids, and you're probably going to be an orchid enthusiast by the time you really come across an orchid that likes lots of intense sun. Most of them, for the most part, are they like sun, but it's going to best be indirect, like maybe in a window that gets a little bit of sun.

And then the high humidity, I think, is not across the board because there's orchids that live in mountainous areas where it's kind of rocky and desert and arid. But most of the orchids you find, like you're going to find at the store in the United States or the UK, they're probably tropical. So they want high humidity on the order of like 60% to 80%.

And they want temperatures, daytime temperatures of at least 80 degrees Fahrenheit. God knows what that is in Celsius. And then they want like 12 to 14 hours of daylight. In 20% chance of rain. Like I mentioned, they need to be water, but like you said, they really like the way to kill an orchid is to overwater it

or to not have your drainage right. A waterlogged orchid is no good. No, apparently they can tolerate drought better than overwater. Much better. So again, you want to water it weekly. You want to wait until the growing medium dries out again and then water it.

And since you're fertilizing it, it's damaging to put fertilizer onto dry orchid roots, apparently. So which is why you only want to use liquid fertilizer with orchids, but you also want to pre-water it. You want the orchids to be already wet when you use the fertilizer the next day. Right, and you want to dilute that liquid fertilizer too, right?

Yeah, the rule of thumb that I was told was you want to fertilize weekly, weekly. So W-E-A-K-L-Y. I got you. Yeah, OK, I don't even need to finish it. So I use a 2020-20 orchid fertilizer, which smells so bad. It smells like concentrated rodent pee. And it kind of looks like a two actually,

like dried out concentrated rodent pee. Maybe it is. It could be, but apparently that's what orchids like because it's keeping mine going. But it says to use like a teaspoon for a gallon of water. So I use like three quarters of a teaspoon for a gallon of water, and it seems to work pretty well. And use that gallon for all your orchids,

or you just keep that stored? No, I will. So I'll water them until they're nice, the growing medium is nice and wet, and then I'll come the next day. And I'll just kind of give it a couple of turns, a couple of glugs on each orchid just to get it around there. I don't soak them with it.

So it depends on how heavy-handed I am from week to week, and they don't seem to mind one way or another. Sometimes I'll use the whole gallon, but most of the time it's like half to two-thirds of the gallon I'll use to fertilize it. Do you talk to them? I don't think so. I'm not conscious of it if I do, but I might.

Who knows? I'm pretty insane. It's possible I talk to them and don't realize it. You know what I mean? Not like I'm talking to them and they're talking back, but it's entirely possible I say things to them and I'm not aware. OK, but you don't like, you haven't named them

and make an effort to speak to them. Oh, no, no, no. One of my crackpot, come on. I don't know, I don't mind that. You want to hear something weirder than that, though. Some ridiculously high percentage of dog owners don't talk to their dogs. What do you mean?

Like something like, I want to say 60%? We'll have to look it up, but some more than half of dog owners don't talk to their dogs. Like they don't give them orders, or they don't say, you should just tweet faith. So they might give them orders, like sit, or come on, let's go, or something like that. But they're not also like, all right, we're almost there.

Yeah, they're just not, whatever's in between those two things, they're not doing that. They're not talking to their dog. I just find that bizarre. Yeah. I mean, I'm yelling at my dogs half the time. Are you? And the other half, I'm talking in a stupid voice.

You don't yell at your dogs. Are you kidding me? You yell at your dogs? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah, of course I do. What do you say? You yell like, I love you so much.

No, I yell, Nico, get off of me, good god, stop it. Oh, OK, that's pretty cute. Yeah, I mean, it's not cute. Like, what do you do when a dog is in your face, like chewing your hair, and like scraping, scratching your chest, and. Are you threatening them with the BB gun? Yeah, that's like the puppy pounder.

No, I never hit my dogs, but man, I yell at them all the time. Nico is just so needy. Is that your shelter? No, no, no, no, Charlie's great. She never needs to get yelled at. OK. Nico's just needy and like jumps on people, and there's no way a dog can jump on someone,

and you're like, would you please get off of that person? Oh, sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Nico, get down. Yeah, I got you. I see what you're saying, yeah. That kind of stuff, not yelling like, I hate you because I'm upset at my own life. Right, right, yeah.

That's what I was after. You're like, I hate my job. It's all your fault. Hey, did I tell you that we did a DNA test on little Momo and she's like 10% shelter? Oh, really? Yeah. We were like, well, that explains her hurting us

toward the door. Like if one of us is getting her ready to go out, she'll go and get the other one. Just kind of like push it, push them toward the door. Is she also just very aware of where everyone is at all times, like checks on everything? Yeah, yeah, like if I go to bed first, Momo will go to bed with me.

And then if Momo decides that you meet, stayed up long enough, she'll come out in the doorway and kind of look at her like, all right, it's time to go to bed, she'll come and get you me, yeah. And does she sit in the window and bark at everything? If she had a window to bark out of, yes. We live in a windowless box. Right, so that's Charlie's main job is she just sits

on the sunroom sofa looking out the window as if it is her post. Yeah. And anyone that goes by, she'll bark at. Yeah, does Charlie bark at birds? No, just like people and other dogs. I mean, and literally like it's her job, you can tell she's not a jerk.

She's just like, I'm on duty is what we call it, you know? Right, understood. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, tell her to clock out. Clock out, Charlie. Does she listen? Come to bed. Have you tried yelling at her?

No, she doesn't need yelling like I said. I said clock out, Charlie. All right, so back to orchids. Potting and repotting orchids. Generally, unless you have to repot an orchid, don't repot an orchid just cause you're like, yeah, I'm kind of sick of that pot. Let me put it in a new one.

Right, because they say, oh yeah, I'm not very happy with that. I'm not going to send up another flower for at least a year. Yeah, they don't like getting repotted. But if you have to repot, I mean, what's your advice? Your idea. Actually, I've not had that much trouble repotting.

Yeah, I guess they don't immediately. That actually, to tell you the truth, now that you asked me that, that explains why some of them haven't flowered for so long cause I have repotted them here there. But I was overwatering them and it was kind of vital that I did repot them because their roots were decaying.

Gotcha. So if you have an orchid that you realize you've overwatered, and this is when I learned not to use sphagnum moss any longer because it really holds in water. And that's the great thing about the pine bark is that it just lets the water go right through. It hangs on to some of it, but the point is to just water an orchid as frequently

as it needs it rather than watering it and letting the soil hold the water in for it, right? So the sphagnum moss was holding that water in and the roots were rotting. So I had to repot it. I had to trim off some of the old roots. And then I learned this trick somewhere on the internet, but I dusted the roots that were rotted with cinnamon.

Oh. And I think cinnamon might be an antimicrobial or something like that, but brother, my orchid loved me for that. Really? Thank you so much. It started growing almost immediately, even though I just repotted it

and cut off a significant number of its roots. Huh. Yeah, so it's vital to repot it sometimes, but yeah, like you said, you don't wanna just be like, I think I'll switch it to this pot for this month because I like yellow in the spring. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. What else, you got anything else? No, I think you said that growing it from seed is next to impossible, so just go buy one. Yeah, I'd like to hear from, yeah, from, I'm sure there's some horticulturists who have done that. I'd like to hear about that experience.

Yeah, I'd like to hear all the things that got wrong. You're like, chuck them and yell at your dog. Right. We would also, I think we kind of touched on it at the very beginning, but gotta give a shout out to the article, The Orchid Thief, and the movie that was based on it.

Yeah. Adaptation. Yeah, I don't think we can, like in our stupid article, it's it. Orchids in Pop Culture, the movie Wild Orchid with Mickey Rourke and Carrie Otis. I'm like, are you kidding me? That was it.

Like there was an entire movie written about orchid hunting and the super rare ghost orchid that John LaRouche hunts in the wild swamps of Florida by the great writer, Susan Orlean, and it was not even mentioned. No. You know, I got a story about that.

My friend Stacy works, it's a costumer in the film industry, and she worked on adaptation. And about a year before she started work, I was just into reading any and all scripts I could read at the time. And she said, I got a new script. It's called the Orchid Thief by some

dude named Charlie Kaufman. It's like, all right. And I read it in a night. I couldn't put it down. And I called her up the next day. I was like, I've never read anything like this in my life. There hadn't been anything like that. This is unlike any movie I've ever heard of.

And I have no idea what I just read. I know. And then they changed the name from Orchid Thief to Adaptation. And it's one of my favorites of all time. It's great. Charlie Kaufman needs to get back to work. Oh, he's working.

What's he doing now? Did you see Annamalisa? Yeah, that was like three years ago. That's what I'm saying. Get to work, Kaufman. I'm sure he's working on something. I hope so. Yeah, I love that adaptation.

Chris Cooper, that performance is one of my favorite acting roles of all time. Yeah, they couldn't have cast it better than that. God, he was great. Yeah. Well, that's adaptation. As was Nick Cage. Don't wanna shortchange him.

No, and of course, Meryl Streep. I mean, does it even need to be said? Yeah, but Nick Cage, he gets a lot of crap. But that dual role was pretty terrible. Oh, sure. Yeah, the Wicker Man remake. That was not the least of them. If you go into Netflix, he's on like every third movie

on Netflix. Yeah, he's making bank, brother. I don't know if you, maybe. He's definitely keeping his head above water. Well, he's spendy, so. Oh, is that what it is? Yeah, apparently he is quite a reputation for buying ridiculous things that cost a lot of dough.

Well, you got anything else? No, I got nothing else. All right, well, welcome slash, I'm sorry, to all of the new people who've never heard this podcast before, but are into orchids and thought they'd give it a try. And if you wanna know more about orchids, you can type that word in the search bar at howstuffworks.com.

Since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Speaking of all the things you just said and Listener Mail, did you see that one from the guy? He said that we were just dilatants and kind of laid into us. Yeah. You go to just dilatants and all you do is just talk for like 40 minutes about an overview

about things and email them back. It was like, you got it, buddy. Yeah, that's exactly what we are. His complaint was that each episode is about a different topic. Yeah. I was like, yeah, that's the point of the book. And that we just give the broadest of overviews

over 45 minutes. I was like, that is our show to a tee. Yeah. You should write our bio. Keep looking, keep looking, buddy. No, I wish them well. That was nice of you. That's world-class check.

All right, I'm gonna call this flight attendant response. Surprisingly, that show kind of blew up. We got a lot of responses from airline workers and flight attendants and passengers. Most of them weren't angry either. No, I think we did good on that one. So here we go. Flight attendant here, thank you for the awesome podcast.

It was really on point. I was impressed with the amount of research and how much you got it right. You both asked for someone to weigh on and whether we were paid for delays. The cabin door closed. The answer is yes. We can even be paid a percentage for delays

with the cabin door open, but it has to be over a certain amount of time with customers on board and we have to file the request ourselves. Most people don't because it's not much money and not worth it. Secondly, and this is with this person's airline. Right.

So I don't know if that's true across the board. Is it a major airline? Well, just let me finish. Okay. Secondly, there was some debate over whether we needed to score an 80 or a 90 in training. Actually, you're both right. We have to score at least an 80 on the first take.

If we fail, we have to score a 90 on the retake. Thank you for doing an episode on our profession. The things could be better. We love our jobs and have a great time. Hope to see you all on a flight sometime soon. And Chuck, the whiskey will be on me. Sorry, Josh. No peanuts.

That is from Daniel, flight attendant, major airline. Everything's always coming up, Chuck. I bet you get your whiskey, too, my friend. That'd be great. Well, thanks a lot, Daniel. I'll be sure to go check the email out and figure out what airline you work for and then start flying it and hope we cross paths

so I can get some free whiskey, too. If you want to offer us free whiskey, we are all ears. You can tweet to us. I'm at JoshumClark on Twitter and there's also an official SYSK podcast page. I also have a website, by the way. AreyouseriousClark.com. You can find Chuck on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant

and at the official Stuff You Should Know Facebook page. You can send all of us, including Jerry, an email to StuffPodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called,

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place

because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts.