$4 orchids eh! Ok, I'll take 3 of them.

I went to Home Depot today to check their seed display.  It was the classic seed display that everyone else in town has.  Nothing new.  However I did find some Phalaenopsis orchids on sale.  They wouldn't be on sale if they were still in bloom.  I have no idea what color they will be.  Hopefully I got at least two different colors or patterns out of the three of them.

I have never had orchids before and know very little about them.  Here's what I think I know about them.  They bloom only once or twice a year.  Their blooms can last a couple months.  They don't require any direct sun and are relatively low maintenance plants.  However, many people do not have the patience to care for them while they wait for the plants to bloom a second time. 

I would have never purchased them if I had not thought about replacing some plants I had in a few pots in my dining area.  My wife and I picked out some desert plants we liked and put them in these three pots.  For what little I know about orchids I know exponentially less about desert plants.

Here they were in the three white pots.

I still like them and will continue to care for them (they require very little attention).  I just didn't like the look of that corner.  I had orginally planned on growing herbs there throughout the winter but they herbs were just to leggy and required too much water to keep them happy.  The pots are just too small and there wasn't enough soil to absorb enough water to keep herbs for any amount of time.  Hence why we moved to desert plants. 


Here are the $4 beauties.

 They aren't too much to look at yet but I like the way they look in their terra cotta pots against the wall and their tongue like foliage stands out a lot more than the prickly previous tenants.

Hopefully the wife will like the new look when she gets home tonight.  I'll have to tell her I paid $25 for each one and see what happens.  If this is my last blog, you'll know why. 

Let me know if you like the new look and if you have any advice on orchid care.
TC

Why not start some seeds?

I purchased some seeds a couple weeks ago from a company in Newfoundland.  http://www.seedsandmore.net/
They offer a great selection of annuals, perennials, flowering shrubs and tree seeds with cheap shipping throughout Canada.  This is the second time I ordered from them.  A few years back I bought some japanese maple seeds (Acer palmatum) which arrived in great condition and many of them germinated in the first season.  Here is what they looked like last fall.  They are currently in a pile of leaves under about 4 feet of snow.  I guess we will see how they did in a couple months.

This year, I purchased a castor bean collection from them.  It contains 4 varieties of the same species Ricinus communis but 4 different subspecies.

 The patterns and coloration on the seeds were surprising.  The castor beans I have seeded before were just a matte black color.  These were quite fancy.  Despite their wonderful looks, the seeds are highly poisonous.  I believe there is no known antidote for the ricin toxin??  So keep away from pets, children etc... 

One thing I love about the castor seeds is the quick germination time.  I have seen them swell up and begin germination after 24 hours in hot water.  I labelled 4 different cups A-D and added 4 seeds to each.  I will save the rest for years to come.  I half filled the cups with hot water and placed them and the seeds in the heated seed starter tray.  I will plant them in pots tommorow.  I will use a 4 inch pot to start with because the castor plants grow so fast.  I am really excited about the zanzibariensis variety because of the 15+ foot height possibility.  Can't wait to grow a monster like that in my small backyard.

 I also bought some japanese black pine (Pinus thungergii) seeds which I will cold stratify in the fridge for a couple months before sowing.  Since I was a return customer, they also threw in a free pack of Mexican Weeping Pine seeds (Pinus patula).  As the name suggests, these trees are not hardy but I may try to germinate a couple to grow indoors.  I love anything free.

While I was in the grow room with the camera, I took a shot of a new shoot from a Phyllostachys bissetii plant that I bought as a rhizome last fall, but it came with a short culm.  That culm survived (despite being wet packed for over two weeks) and this is the first new shoot for this plant.

I'll update on the progress of the castor beans in about a week.  Based on previous experience, they should be a decent size by then. 
TC

Winter Damage

Hey, we hit 0 degrees today and 3 degrees is just a couple days away.  I can't stop thinking about spring but I know it's months away. 

I made it to the cottage this weekend and I thought I would report on any snow damage.  The deep snow cover is probably helping a lot my evergreen plants (Mahonia, Pieris, Fargesia, Ilex, Leucothoe, Rhodos etc..) escape the brutal PEI wind chills.  I think the constant wind will be the limiting factor for overwintering my phyllostachys when they get bigger.  I am going to work on moving some of them this summer into more protected sites.  I headed out on the snowshoes this weekend and found some great microclimates to take advantage of.  I didn't snap any pictures.  I think I was too excited and my mind was racing with ideas.  The clearings are in the middle of mature black spruce, scotch pine and red pine stands.  They were cut out by my father in law 8 years ago but have been ignored since.  I never found them before because the vegetation has grown up so much over the last 8 years that any sign of the trails have been camouflaged.  However, with no leaves on the shrubs and a height advantage of 3+ feet of snow we were able to navigate the old trail system.  Now that I know it, we will bush-hog it all down this spring and reclaim the trails.  I think I will try Phyllostachys rubromaginata, aureosulcata and bissetii in these protected sites.

When we had the eclipse a few months ago, we also happened to have a storm surge on the same weekend.  It caused a lot of damage on the east coast but the cottage was relatively unscathed.  The tides were exagerated by the storm surge and the eclipse and this led to some really high water.  It washed out part of the shoreline and left us with 3 huge spruce to clean up this spring.   Check out the root system in the pic below.  We might tow up the root system and incorporate it into the garden somehow.

While walking around I took a shot of this old stump because of the cool striations and colors.  I wish I had a photographer who documenting things for me.  I usually forget to snap pictures and I only sport a simple point and shoot.  This one still turned out pretty nice.

 
All my Phyllostachys are bent over and pinned under plastic to the ground.  They are safely?  under the snow.  Hopefully the weight of the snow doesn't cause the canes to snap.  I didn't protect any of the Fargesia and there were a few leaves that were visible.

Leucothoe

 Mahonia

 Fargesia nitida

 Fargesia murielae

 Fargesia rufa

Everything else is completely covered by snow.  These were the only exposed plants.

The wind toppled over an old black spruce but luckily a heroic apple tree managed to stop the spruce from crushing my very small Acer palmatum 'Butterfly'  The picture below is almost comical. 

Taking care of this tree will be a priority as soon as the snow melts.  Hopefully the apple tree can hold up until then. 

Well, back to watching the Phyllostachys aurea grow inside.  Most of the culms have topped out and are starting to send out branches. 

My Grow Op

I had an unfinished bathroom in my basement when I moved in.  The walls were craked filled, and painted but there were no fixtures or trim.  For the first couple of years (before my plant addiction) I used it as a storage room.  However the white walls reminded me of a grow room I used at university.  So this year I finally hauled everything out of there and installed four fluorescent light fixtures.  These are just standard fixtures and not the specially made grow lights with higher wattage.

All the lights are plugged into a timer and they stay on for about 17 hours a day.  You can also see in the picture one of the walls in covered with a shiny blanket.  I found it at the dollar store as an emergency shelter and thought that it may add to the albedo effect in the room.  However, I'm not sure if it has better reflective properties than the white walls or not.

Here is a look from the doorway.  You can see that I purchased two greenhouses to put in the room.  I did this to increase the humidity for the plants without making the basement too damp. It seems to be working great.  Sometimes I get a little water condensing underneath the shelving and dripping on the floor but it is just a cheap linoleum floor that it is easy to mop up. 

 As you can see it is pretty crammed on the shelf.  I know that fluorescents are supposed to be only inches above the plants but the greenhouse framing prevents that.  It doesn't seem to stop the plants from growing.  The Fargesia rufa's never stop shooting. 

 Here is my potted Pseudosasa japonica.  It is currently shooting about 10 culms.  It is fun to watch the progress while 4 to 5 feet of snow lays in my backyard.  Notice the plant stand it sits on.  The casters seem like pretty cheap plastic but the framing is really strong.  I found them last week for $5 marked down from $30.  So I bought six of them.  If the casters start breaking (they passed my skateboarding and jumping test at the store) I could replace them with better wheels. 

 Here is a shot of my Fargesia nitida seedlings.  This one is just pushing it's second culm.  In the picture below you can try to find the three seeds that have just germinated.  The seeds germinated quite quickly (2 weeks) after a soaking in warm water for 48 hours.  However, of the 60 seeds only about 10 have germinated.  Oh well, they were quite old.  I am just happy to have had a few survive.  So far.

The Fargesia robusta and Sasaella masamuneana 'Albostriata' have finished shooting for now.  I am assuming they will start shooting again in the spring when I can finally move them outside into some stronger solar energy and soaking rains.  I managed to save the Sasaella from a discount rack somewhere in Ontario.  It was $5 and barely alive.

This next picture is what that Fargesia robusta looked like after I took it out of the box it was crammed in with 10 other bamboo plants last May.  I was not happy with the shipping from Canada's Bamboo World in Bristish Columbia but really I should just be happy that they even ship to New Brunswick.  Oh well, I guess with bamboo you are paying for what's beneath the soil anyway.  Right?

 
This is my Fargesia angustissima.  It started shooting in the early fall and then temperatures in my outdoor greenhouse (R.I.P. see previous post) started to tumble too low for culm production to continue.  However, when I brought the plant inside in November, the culms continue to push up and eventually branched and leafed out in the last month or so.  The color is great.  It started pushing a new shoot just the other day.  Check out the photo below.

The other greenhouse still has some room.  There will be a lot more when I finally take the potted bamboo to my classroom whenever these negative temperatures pass and I can borrow a truck.  The second greenhouse has a few ferns, some Phyllostachys bissetii that grew from rhizomes, a couple castor beans that I started early and one very weak Arundinaria gigantea that I started from a rhizome. 

 I ordered a variety of seeds tonight and look forward to starting them within the next couple of months.  I think it's going to be a long wait for spring this year because of the snow depth.  Especially considering we were at least two weeks early last year.  Until then, I guess I'll just continue to watch these grow and resist from drowning them by overwatering.
TC

Goodbye Greenhouse

Well we have had over 250cm of snow so far this winter.  WOW!  My new hobby is shoveling.  The weight built up so much that my greenhouse collapsed.  At first I thought it had only ripped through the covering but upon further inspection I noticed that it had bent, broke and tore the metal poles.  Check out the pics below.

Picture from the kitchen window.



I had duct taped the outflow from my air exchanger to the greenhouse and it was workign great.  It was keeping the greenhouse at least 3 degrees warmer than the outside even at night.  After I shoveled the snow of the collapsed room I went inside.  Check out the framing.  It's destroyed.



The was a lot of force at play here.  The poles not only slid out and but tore out!

Check out how much color the rosemary and thyme has.

I guess this just means I will have to replace it with an upgraded model next year.   If I don't spend all my money on bamboos and japanese maples.

The height of the snow beside the greenhouse built up as high as the roof and therefore the snow on the roof couldn't slide off the right side.  The left side of the greenhouse roof was blocked by patio privacy panel.  The result is a greenhouse fit for the spring clean-up.

Guess what, it's still snowing.