Can we tour your greenhouse?

I wish that your Spring would come to you very soon, lakesidecallas! I have had the heater off for about 3 weeks now.

Come on guys, I am not seeing photo tours of your greenhouses!!! Bring it!

Ok-maybe if I say here that I will take pictures tomorrow of them then I will....although it is supposed to be cloudy and raining tomorrow, and grhouses always look better in sunny days. Mine are also kind of boring-just tons of potted annuals

We still need to see them. We might disagree with you.

This is how I made my stream. I wasn't going for anything really deep. I just wanted some water moving through. I dug a channel 20 ft long from the back wall of the GH towards the front and ended it in a 3 ft deep pool. I bought a pre-fab waterfall fixture (yeah, I cheated, but you can;t tell because its now covered in moss and plants and looks very natural) and ran a piece of tubing from the pool to the fall and connected it to a pond pump, then covered the tubing with a layer of gravel, river rock and other things. Then I edged it with flat stones and filled it up and its been going ever since.

There is a large goldfish that lives in the still pool and some minnows that swim up and down the streamcourse, and some frogs live in here year round.

I planted things in the stream and along the sides. Its pretty cool, I like it a lot. I have orchids, hoyas, bromeliads, and epicacti that hang in baskets from the ceiling over the pond too.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v466/Bihai/Newstream1.jpg

another view
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v466/Bihai/stream3-1.jpg

This message was edited Mar 31, 2009 8:25 PM

I started out with the plants at the back by the little fall
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v466/Bihai/Streamscape1.jpg

This message was edited Mar 31, 2009 8:27 PM

This message was edited Mar 31, 2009 8:27 PM

Then, this set of photos was taken about 5 months later.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v466/Bihai/StreamFour2006.jpg

This message was edited Mar 31, 2009 8:30 PM

This message was edited Mar 31, 2009 8:34 PM

another shot...
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v466/Bihai/StreamOneAug2006.jpg

another:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v466/Bihai/StreamThree2006.jpg

And the last one
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v466/Bihai/StreamTwoAug2006.jpg

I have a pool bubble green house here in Washington, DC. We workout in the pool. The heated water warms the interior air. We take advantage of this by keeping most of our outdoor plants in there all winter.

It's an extreme rainforest kind of greenhouse, 100% humidity 24/7, plus dripping off the ceiling. We spray with fungicide before moving the plants in, and as necessary.

The other thing I discovered was that the interior air maintains a very high level of carbon dioxide, from the pool chemicals outgassing CO2.

The combination It produces some interesting effects.

Here's the pool, without bubble.

here's the bubble

Here's inside

More

The environment produces rooting from the branches of oleander

WOW!
How big is your pool???
Ours is 15 x 30 and does not have a pool screen over it (which is almost blasphemy in Florida).
If you don;t mind me asking, how much did your pool bubble system cost, and where did you get it?? That's something we might like...we don;t swim in the pool until late April here, it doesn;t get warm enough til then

also flowering of a cordelyine australis

Pool is 10x16. The bubble is as small as they'd make one.

It cost about $2,300 plus various hardware for installation.

Check their website http://www.rontimco.com/index.php/pool-domes-liners-covers/pool-domes --I am very satisfied.

When it gets below 20 degrees F here, the zipper freezes up and I have to pour hot water down it to get it open.

But the interior air goes no lower than the low 40's. With 83 degree water, it makes for nice a workout, but is not for general hanging out.


I'd guess that in Gainesville, the problem would be OVER heating, which it is here when it gets into the high 70s.

Love the bubble! I never saw anything like that before.

Gothqueen, do you have paths in your greenhouse, or how do you move around?

Goth Queen -

Really strange. I NEVER take pictures of my greenhouse and the plants. I takes oodles of pictures of my gardens, but never even once think of taking pictures in there. I am in beautiful Key West this week so I can't take any pictures, but will when I return. I, like other northerners, mostly overwinter my tropical like plants, propagate for my outdoor gardens, and then seed in early spring. Right now I have about 30 flats of seedlings. I love to give plants away to all my relatives and friends.

I love the plants here in Key West, but wouldn't even think of trying to overwinter some. Many require consistent temperatures over 70.

How do you handle pests in your greenhouse? Do you have an ecosystem where different pests eat others? I am afraid I constantly fight aphids and this year, My Sky Blue Thunbergia got spider mites. The leaves were covered with some sticky stuff, turned yellow and fell off. I don't like using pesticides so I bought ladybugs to eat the aphids, but I have no idea how to handle the spiders. They are white and weird looking. Anybody fought spider mites and won???

Bonnie

I had a big battle with pests when I had all the foliage from the closely packed heliconias in there. Mealies, scale and mites. But getting rid of all that foliage pretty much cleared the problem. I get an occasional infestation now, mainly on stuff like plumeria and I have to pay attention to the Cattleya alliance orchids, they are pest magnets for some reason. I do a couple of Neem Oil sprays at the beginning of the season, in sequence, and I treat the large trees (bauhinias, plumerias, and some of the palms) with a drenching of the Bayer Systemic in Spring so it can come out in the new growth. Otherwise, I just keep a watch out to catch anything as soon as it starts and Neem it out of existance. I try not to use pesticides like Orthene, Cygon etc anymore, as I have a breeding colony of green treefrogs in the greenhouse that hatch babies out in the tanks of my bromeliads, and I also have a few snakes that live in there and many 'stream frogs' and toads. I don;t want to harm them. They do keep some pests in check, but for the frogs, it has to move or they don;t eat it, so they don't help with scale and mealies. The fish in the ponds and streams eat mosquito larva in the water and I have dragon and damselflies as well.

I also keep a bottle of Ivory dish soap in th GH and mix up a soap spray for spot-use at any time.

Running the overhead sprinklers nightly also helps a lot to keeping pests down, and keeps my predators happy.

Here's an orchid in bloom at the moment, peeking out between a palm frond

All righty then-I actually took some pictures today and here they are!
This is what we call # 1 grhouse. It was the first that I built back in 1991. Its the one that I throw all my tropical plants in, in October, just before a frost when we are always in a rush. As a result-and because I have too many tropicals, its always in a state of chaos. It takes me a few months to get it under control, and now , as I need the room for the annuals, I have just shoved everything underneath, so you really cant see them, except for a few here and there.

this is the other side of #1. You can see a bunch of heliconias at the very end of the aisle, and a red and a pk torch ginger, but they are all stacked in back of each other. Some are over 8' or more and in containers. Like I said before-not sure if these pictures show very much!

Still in #1. here are a few tropicals , mostly alocasias that I have kept on the table all winter, but it is the agave that I am in love with at the moment-isn't it pretty? lol

forgot to say that the flashlight in the previous picture is for when i have to go slug hunting at night. Easier to get them in the dark. This winter has been unusually bad for them and they were on the top shelf eating all the petunias when they were babies. I got 12 the first night!

This picture is the table in #2-some of the tropicals that will go out in a month.

here is the right side of #2. The empty flats have caladiums in them and haven't popped yet. They are closest to the heater. There are a bunch of flats underneath near the heater also, as there are in all the grhouses. When they pop, then they come up to one of the middle shelves to get light so they grow faster. Kind of hard to see any plants in this picture, was afraid of that.

here is the left side of #2. You can see where some caladiums have started to take off.

Still in #2, I got up on the table so you could see down the grhouse better

Now we are in # 3 grhouse. This is my new puppy-isn't she a sweetheart? Her name is Chloe and she is 6 months old-already weighs over 60 lbs, but she looks very lean to me. Her dad is a Anatolian Shephard, which I had never heard of, but she looks just like him, and her mother is a German Shephard. Both the dogs love to lay in front of that heater (any of them) when its on, but maybe not quite that close-but only a few feet back. It always amazes me as that is a very large heater-a 200K btu and it puts out some heat. They love it! They hear the heater click on and get up and lay there waiting for the heat to come out.

Here is the left side of # 3 with Bear taking a nap. All the tags on the ground are from when the fan comes on and blows them off the table. Which is why he is sleeping there-he loves that air blowing in when its hot out. I can't tell you how many times I have almost stepped on him when I am carrying a stack of filled flats and its at night, and I can't see over the flats.

Another picture of Bear-cause you just can't get enough pictures of him! He used to be so scared of the camera-he looks too tired to move though.

Very cool! And yes that is a great agave. We have those planted out all over the place here, they are my favorites. There are some really huge specimens around town too.
Do you use all your plants for your own use?
I do the same thing, I propagate selected things to plant out every year.

here is a view of #3 from the table looking down the grhouse

here are some more tropicals that will go out in a month. They are on the ground by the heater. I did have the ornamental grasses there, but the dogs were eating them-so they are outside now. We go through this every year. One time I was loading an order and Bear was standing there eating the grass that I was sending out..

Gothqueen-I guess I forgot to say that these are commercial grhouses. I am a small wholesale bedding plant grower. I sell to landscapers, Duke University etc. My crop is basically presold, and I grow some extras as well. So most everything that you see will be gone by the end of May. I would take a gun (if I had one) and shoot myself if I had to deal with all these annuals all summer! lol There are hundreds of flats of just one type of plant in there. some are already outside, and we haven't even finished taking cuttings or transplanting what there will be. Lots of work still...

This is an area of my greenhouse in the very front corner, up by the pond. The photos that follow show what it was before it came to look like this. The centerpiece now is a young Kerriodoxa elegans palm, with a thin feathery Chamaedorea palm growing up behind it. There are also numerous anthuriums, hoyas and other plants growing here

this is a view of the same area down to the ground...

And this is how it all got started...
I had a huge Heliconia caribaea "Criswick" growing in this corner, but decided to remove it, because I knew it would eventually spread out of the space and would be 10 times harder to get out later on.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v466/Bihai/Criswickbefore.jpg

Oops I got the pics out of order, LOL. That was after I dug it out. This shows the cork bark getting attached to the support beam, to mount orchids and bromeliads onto
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v466/Bihai/Criswickbefore1.jpg

This message was edited Apr 1, 2009 8:58 PM

here are some more caladiums that have started to come up.

I keep most of my tropical palms and larger tropicals -jasmines, citrus , tropical bamboos etc in the house as you can see there is no room for them. That is why I want to build a grhouse like yours where I can plant them. I did take a room in the middle of the house that didnt have any windows and put a 4' x 4' skylight in it and that works great for a bunch of the palms-I think I have over 80 of the palms that are tropical and have to stay inside. It is getting out of hand-to say the least....lol

farther in to the process...
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v466/Bihai/Criswickbefore2.jpg