We have a couple of posts on why orchid info on the web is so bad, wrong, or unreliable. You can see them here and here. They’ll give you helpful background info on this topic.
Because there’s so much either bad/wrong advice on orchids, or good advice that simply may not apply to you (for different reasons), below are some questions you should ask first. Your goal is to find out whether the advice applies to you and your growing situation.
Who is giving the advice? What kind of experience do they have? How long have they been growing? These are the obvious questions to ask.
Where in the country (or world) is this person growing their orchids? For example, indoor orchid growers in in MN (and there are plenty) cannot readily use advice given by growers in FL about sticking orchids outside. Some growers literally live in a rainforest (e.g., parts of HI, much of Brazil, etc.) and their advice needs to be taken with care, as anything they do probably works by virtue of the fact that they live in a rainforest.
Are the growing conditions like yours? Is this person growing in a home or in a greenhouse? Or are they growing in a small greenhouse setup in inside a home, and they failed to mention this? The kind of mix you use, and the frequency of watering, all depend on answers to these kinds of questions.
What kinds of orchids does this person grow? How long have they grown them? Plenty of people are successful with, say, Phalaenopsis, but what applies to supermarket Phals may not apply to esoteric, deciduous Dendrobiums. One tell-tale of a know-it-all who doesn’t actually know all that much is if they refer to “orchids” too categorically, as if all orchids need exactly the same conditions. That’s like saying all mammals need the same conditions and care. A really experienced grower will go into detail about specific types of orchids by genera (e.g., Dendrobium, Paphiopedilum, Cattleya, Oncidium, etc.) and qualify at least some of their statements for specific types of orchids because they have experience with them. A self-declared expert (there are so many in the orchid world, it’s unbelievable) who has grown 18 supermarket Phals successfully in Florida might give you reasonable info on growing Phals in the home, but that info might get you in trouble if you’re trying to grow miniature Oncidiums mounted on wood slabs in Michigan.
The real issue is whether the advice-giver is tailoring their advice to someone with your growing conditions (preferably, similar geography) and your experience level. Advice from one expert to another is not necessarily the best advice for a new grower.
When I was a new grower, I bought hook-line-and-sinker into some wonderful postings of some people’s results growing in semi-hydro. It sounded incredible — the lush leaves, the number of flowers, the ease of growth, etc. I switched my whole collection (about 30 plants at the time) to semi-hydro. It was a complete failure, and I ended up killing a bunch of those plants, and setting back growth on the ones that survived. It’s not that semi-hydro doesn’t work, it’s that I wasn’t ready for that kind of info at my level of growing experience. I didn’t realize how bad my town’s water quality was for orchids, nor did I understand about seasonality of re-potting, that orchids make roots specific to a type of media (and going from bark to semi-hydro during the wrong season was not going to work well), etc. I simply wasn’t ready for that style of growing, and that kind of information at my limited experience with orchids led me to disaster.
If I only knew to ask the right kinds of questions, maybe I wouldn’t have failed so miserably… But then you wouldn’t have the benefit of my mistakes.
So when you watch/read/hear orchid advice on the web (or anywhere), ask these questions before you act on it. Make sure the advice applies to your growing conditions, your growing location, and your level of growing experience!