Please bring plants to the meeting for Show-and-Tell! Both the spectacular and the not-so-spectacular are always welcome and appreciated!

We had so much fun last year participating in the Missouri Orchid Society's show at the Missouri Botanical Gardens that we'd like to do it again! The Missouri Orchid Society Show & Sale will be February 5 & 6 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the Beaumont Room at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. So start convincing your plants to bloom in time for the show! Remember, last year we won second place for overall display!

Giving a unique identification number to each new plant helps differentiate it from others. Assign each plant a four- or five-digit code where the first two digits represent the year in which the orchid is acquired and the last numbers represent its sequence in the acquisitions that year. You could also record the day, month and year the plant blooms so you'll learn which of your orchids flower regularly, which flower more than once each year and, perhaps most importantly, which do not flower for you. You could also take a picture of the plant in bloom. (from Ken Slump, AOS 2003 probationary judge)

The last meeting was at 3:00 PM on November 14th, in the Adams Conference Center, College of Veterinary Medicine. Howard Wilson presented a program on how to better photograph your orchid flowers and plants.

The next meeting will be held at Superior Garden Center on Sunday, December 12, from 3-4 p.m. Please bring treats for our holiday party! We will mount Phals. that Barbara is getting from Zuma Canyon and discuss our diplay for the February show at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. We will also vote for officers for next year. Please bring plants for show-and-tell, including any plants that have problems. Someone else may have had the same problem and can make suggestions.

For those people who have a computer and scanner, you have an alternative to using a camera to photograph your orchid flowers. Flat bed scanners can be used to produce high quality images of many orchid flowers. Using this method, you can get some extremely good results, even good enough to publish in orchid magazines. The only problem with scanning your orchid flower is that you can't scan from the side, or scan the whole orchid. Scanning is only suitable for things that don't have much depth, such as the front view of an orchid flower. Generally, this is not a problem, as the front view is the most common direction for photographing an orchid.

For those who don't know much about computers, a flat bed scanner is a piece of equipment which can be connected to a computer to electronically record an image of a piece of paper. It looks somewhat like a photocopier top in that it is a box with a hinging lid onto which you place the original copy and a light passes over the original in the scanning process. Generally, you scan a photo so that it can be included in a document you produce. For further details and examples, visit:
http://www.users.bigpond.com/gmcorbin/bos/scanner.html