My local greenhouse's sale rack taught me more than any book

I stopped by Johnson's Greenhouse outside of Madison last Saturday just to grab a bag of soil, and I ended up spending an hour digging through their sad little clearance table. They had these droopy orchids marked down to $3 each, roots spilling out of cracked plastic pots, leaves all wrinkled. I grabbed two on a whim because I figured I couldn't mess them up worse than the store already did. Got them home, unpotted everything, and found the bark was completely broken down into mush, basically mud. I rinsed the roots, chopped off the dead stuff, and repotted them in fresh medium with a bit more airflow. One of them already has a new root tip after about 2 weeks, and the other is pushing out a leaf. The owner told me they just water everything on the same schedule and don't bother adjusting for humidity, which blew my mind. Has anyone else rescued clearance plants and actually learned more from the failures than from perfect specimens? What's your best salvage story?

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