Adventures in Orchid Outreach Part I - Judy's Day

Gozde (left) and Mom (right) at our main table.

     For those of us who love orchids, it can be tricky convincing others that orchids are fun and fairly easy to grow.  They have some quirks that make them a little different than raising your average houseplant, but with the right tricks you can successfully grow most orchids at home.
Last week, Mom and I participated in Judy’s Day, a fabulous family outreach event hosted by the Cornell Botanic Gardens (https://www.cornellbotanicgardens.org/learning/youth-programs/judys-day). The goal of Judy’s Day was to provide fun, informative, and thought-provoking answers to many of the questions surrounding plants.  Each booth featured a different member of the plant family and they all had hands-on activities to engage kids in plant science. 
     Mom and I ran the Orchids Tent along with the help of another Cornell graduate student, Gozde, and some enthusiastic undergraduates.  Our booth had a scavenger hunt where kids had to identify orchids based on characteristics like to monopodial vs. sympodial growth, flower shape, and leaf structure.  The prize for correctly identifying all the orchids was a temporary tattoo Mom designed using one of her orchids.

---

Left: a girl, her father, and one of our undergrad helpers trying out the scavenger. Right: Potinara Dick Smith; the template Mom used for the tattoo prizes.

We also helped the kids plant their own baby orchids to take home and raise.  We purchased the plugs from a grower in Hawaii, so those little guys traveled a long way to be at our event!  We wanted plants that you couldn’t easily find in a grocery or home-improvement store so we got several species including, a Brassolaeliocattleya (BLC), Dendrobium (DEN), Miltassia (MTSSA), Oncidium (ONC), and Rhyncholaeliocattleya (RLC) for the kids to choose from (for more information on these plants and their care check out Mom’s Judy’s Day tab above). We brought 225 orchid plugs to transplant and handed out every one of them, which means Ithaca, NY has more than 200 new budding orchid enthusiasts! 

---

Amanda at her Vanilla table.

     An undergraduate student, Amanda, ran a booth on the Vanilla orchid with a couple specimen plants and a smell test with real and artificial vanilla extract.  If you’ve never smelled the difference between real and artificial vanilla, you should try it out! As someone who is cheap and only ever buys the artificial extract, I was surprised by how different the two smell!
     Another orchid tent run by Julia, a graduate student in Plant Biology, focused on orchid pollination and native orchids in New York.  She had a 3D interactive model of a phalaenopsis flower to teach the kids about how orchid flowers are pollinated, complete with insect pollinators and detachable pollinia.  Julia also runs her own blog on wildflowers (http://www.floralfinds.com/) and you can check out some of her beautiful photos on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/juliakmill/).   
     If you’re interested in doing educational outreach with orchids, Mom and I would be happy to share our teaching materials (scavenger hunt guides, word finds, and cross-word puzzles).  Also, the American Orchid Society has some great resources for kid-related orchid education.  You can check out their website for inspiration at http://www.aos.org/orchids/kids-corner.aspx.
     Finally, we’d like to thank the Ithaca Agway for donating the orchid media we used and Carmela Orchids on the Big Island in Hawaii for providing our orchid plugs!!

---