99 times out of 100, the reason that they die is over watering (or media that promotes the roots being too wet for too long). The good news is that if you under water them, they can recover nicely. Lots of times when you buy them, they come in something like sphagnum moss which will hold water for a LONG time and results in over watering.
Most orchid potting mix is more like chunks of bark with a few other substances mixed in. That works pretty well.
Another common media for orchids and what I've had the best results with is clay pellets.
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/odla-growing-media-clay-pellets-50288546/
The key to this is to get a tall container (I use the quart containers that soup usually come in from a deli or restaurant for take-out. Then create 3-5 holes in the sides of the container about 1-1.5" from the bottom (kind of a pain without splitting the container). Then usually once a week, you completely flood the container with water (and fertilizer) letting it soak for up to 5 mins, then allow the water to drain out down to the holes. That ensures that the clay pellets are damp, and leaves a small reservoir of liquid in the bottom of the pot (that 1-2" of space below the holes). The water in the reservoir will then wick up the clay pellets and keep the pellets wet and the roots happy without them being too wet.
Another key is to not feed them too heavily. Frequent and light feedings is preferred for most common sorts of orchids which is how they live in nature. There's a guy that is (or was back when I was learning ~10 years ago) very active on orchid forums. He used to have a business, but had moved and stopped, but still had a lot of knowledge and info.
I was on a few threads where he shared lots of info as well as exchanging a few PMs with him about this stuff. This is some of the info that he provided.
Quote:
Being an engineer and bit of a nerd, I started delving into the nutritional needs of orchids, and it actually opened my eyes significantly. (Warning! Professorial mode: On)
If you look at the makeup of an orchid, it is 95% water. Of the remaining 5%, about 95% of that is carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, with the first two coming from water and air; the N it gets from the fertilizer we apply. The remaining fraction of a percent is the rest of the stuff it gets from fertilizer.
Add to that some analyses of the water that drips down on orchids in the wild (their primary source of nutrition), and we see that it is almost devoid of any nutritional value - 15-25 ppm total dissolved solids (TDS) is typical, and that's only when it just starts raining - and we learn that most of that is nitrogen.
So my conclusion from that is that nitrogen is the most important nutrient, but it should be applied very sparingly, as 1) the plants have evolved to need very meager nutrition levels, and 2) excessive N can actually stifle flowering.
I won't go into details (look up "Rubisco" if you're a bit of an intellectual masochist), but in order for any plant to add about a pound of mass - a huge amount in orchids - it must absorb and process about 25 gallons (roughly 95 kg) of water, but only about 5 grams of nutrient elements.
So, about 7 or 8 years ago (I've been growing orchids for over 45 years now), all of that led me to this growing regimen:
• Use a VERY open potting medium, so the roots always have excellent air flow around them.
• Water the daylights out of them: Frequent & Flooding. Water is the driving force behind plant growth.
• Use a very small amount of fertilizer at every watering. I mean really little. Divide 2 by the %N on the labels to get the teaspoons per gallon to use.
• Make sure that "fertigation" solution contains nitrogen, calcium, and magnesium; the other stuff can "tag along". (Your water supply may have enough calcium and magnesium in it, but as a user of RO water, I add it.). I prefer K-Lite, a 12-1-1-10Ca-3Mg derivative of the MSU RO formula.
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I found that the K-Lite that he referred to was hard to easily get online. The MSU fertilizer that you often read about, IIRC, led to the development of one that's fairly easy to find called "Peters Cal Mag 15-5-15" which is pretty easy to find (so that's what I used).
Depending upon the climate and weather, I may also mist the orchids once or twice daily (like when it's really dry in the winter with the heat really drying things out.
The most common orchid is phalaenopsis, usually big leaves on opposing sides of the central stalk. My guess is that's what's posted above. Those usually bloom after a few days of temps in the 60s. I'll often put them near a window in the winter in an effort to get them to bloom.