Albert's Greenhouse

At some point, it becomes clear that one has too many plants and not enough time. Or at least it should become clear.

For instance, ever since I was a child, I have absolutely loved the drosera, or sundews. The idea of a plant that creates its own sticky flytrap, and the wraps its deadly leaves around whatever it captures, has fascinated me to no end ever since seeing it in glorious time-lapse action in an old 8mm educational film in junior high school.

So I grow a lot of droseras. There are cool miniatures from Australia, beautiful rosettes from South America, and even species native to the west coast of the United States not a hundred miles from where I live.

But there are tradeoffs here. You can spend your entire life exhaustively researching a few plants and know everything about them. Or you can collect hundreds and hundreds of different plants with different requirements and then have neither the time nor the energy to actually look up whether they are supposed to go dormant in the winter.

I still have no idea whether this drosera was supposed to go dormant this fall, but I am certainly glad to see it sprouting a few new leaves now that spring is just around the corner.

I grow a lot of tropical ant plants in my greenhouse. These are plants which have evolved special relationships with ants - providing them with food and/or shelter in exchange for protection and fertilization.

This Myrmecodia is a southeast asian species which grows a hollowed out stem in which ants take up residence. I like the myrmecodias - though it is difficult to obtain more than the one or two species which have been introduced throughout the rare plant trade in the USA. They grow in interesting shapes and they seem to do well in generic tropical conditions - usually in hanging baskets so they don't rot for overwatering.

They also readily flower - producing miniscule white infloesences and then beautiful orange berries. If you leave the berries on the plant long enough ( see the picture), they eventually dry out and the seeds inside sprout into little additional plantlets, right on the stem of the original plant. Not that I'm recommending this. I just got lazy and I don't really need any more plants. It's usually better to take off the berries, remove the seeds, and immediately plant them in dampish long fiber sphagnum moss. It takes just a couple of years to get a mature plant this way.

Aside from the calla lilies, Sweet Alyssum ( Lobularia maritima ) is another plant which grows half as a bedding flower and half as a weed in my climate. And right now, the few self seeded plants I allow are in their full glory... if glory can be assigned to a plant which is only 4" tall.

I see this plant offered as an annual, to be mixed in with the primroses and pansies in the mild winter garden, and it does make a nice sea of white foamy flowers wherever it goes. In my opinion, the beautiful floral show is not the plants strong point - its heavenly scent is actually what makes it a keeper. And these past few weeks, when the sun has chosen to shine, that scent has been in great evidence.

Walking out of my office building, where a few plants have been placed among the other disposable annuals, I was greeted by a power smell of sweet honeysuckle. And it was not the primroses, nor was it the flowering plums ... it was this little white groundcover, half weed and half flower, which was perfuming the entire parking lot.

Those of you ( yes, all three of you ) who are long-time readers of this excuse for a blog may have noticed that I report a lot on calla lilies, or the Zantedeschia. These native aroids of Africa grow exceptionally well in much of the San Francisco Bay Area where I live, and produce flowers for a large percentage of the year. Aside from the generic white calla, I grow a giant version and a new one for me - a scented white calla. I picked up my Zantedeschia odorata at the Berkeley Botanical Garden plant sale last year, and it's lived in a one gallon pot in front of my house since then. This late winter, it finally flowered for me, after producing a prodigious flush of leaves. I am happy to report that the light, almost citrusy, scent is very pleasing. It's supposed to be like freesia, which I suppose might be the case, though I don't really have a good memory for smells, and can't even remember if I've actually smelt freesia.

The plant does look a lot like the regular calla lily ( Zantedeschia aethiopica ) to the casual observer. it appears to have a shorter and more well defined flowering season, and perhaps a longer flower stalk. It is also very much more amenable to container culture than the more common version, at least in my short experience. I would not have expected such growth in a one gallon pot.

So. Armed with my new squirrel and rat protection devices, I set out to the big orange store in hopes of obtaining new potting soil for my new planter so I could finally grow and eat a ripe tomato. And I got there. And I bought a huge bag of vermiculite, and a huge bag of perlite, and several bags of Supersoil and a bag of chicken manure. And I stuffed it all in the back of the SUV and drove home.

I have, in the past several years, become a great proponent of Supersoil. It's made locally, and it has always in my experience been a superior product - mostly because it's apparently milled to a finer consistency than a lot of the bark/potting soil that's out there for a little less money.

After one too many bags of the cheap potting mix that turned out looking like rejects from the landscaping bark heap, Supersoil has held a place of honor in my potting arsenel. Combined with a lightening agent like perlite, it's in pretty much every single pot in the greenhouse. It also serves duty in my raised beds and supports much of the rest of my gardening endeavours.

You can imagine, then, my disappointment at the latest purchase when I ripped open the six bags I had bought to fine ... bark. And not particularly finely ground bark, either. I don't know if I got the scrapings from the bottom of the lot or what, but I got five bags that I would be very hesitant to use in the greenhouse. They're going in the raised beds, but either something has changed in the formulation of my beloved potting mix, or I just got a very bad batch.

In order to assuage my disappointment, I opened up the bag of chicken manure to mix in with it. This is supposedly composted chicken manure, suitable for light amending of various soils/etc.

I am, as they say, familiar with the chicken manure product, having grown up in the presence of a great many live chickens. In fact, there was a chicken farm not far down the road from my primary school, the smell from which regularly provided rustic charm to our neighborhood when not overshadowed by the scent of the smallish pork operation a few miles in the other direction.

Having only recently transitioned from seeing chicken manure as an overabundant resource to be disposed of to seeing it as a precious source of fertilization when properly composted, I feel somewhat qualified to comment on the contents of the bag. The bag contained what looked for all the world like rice hulls. Pretty dry ones, at that.

Am I just having bad luck here? Is there some sort of chicken waste shortage that's causing the amendment companies to turn to other sources? Am I not getting what I paid for?

I suppose I could try to return the chicken manure ... like a broken light fixture ... but I think I would like to be able to continue shopping at the big orange store for a while longer yet, and plopping a half open bag of alleged chicken leavings onto the customer service counter doesn't seem like a great way to curry favor with the staff. On the other hand, it would appropriately describe the general success of this particular shopping trip.

First, they came for the peaches, and I swore a bit but did nothing.
Then, they came for the tomatoes, and I tried to keep them out with bird netting, which did basically nothing ... except trap some rather bemused looking mourning doves.
Now, they have come for the cucumber flowers and that is about enough of that.

I speak of the neighborhood squirrels, which are a pretty black variety, and quite entertaining at a distance. After an almost complete vegetable gardening fiasco ( they left the habanero peppers alone, but did manage to gnaw on everything else including the eggplant ) last year, I determined that either massive neighborhood squirrel genocide or some other defensive measure was absolutely necessary if I wanted to enjoy the fruits (literally and figuratively ) of my gardening labors.

Enter the squirrel cage. It's 6 feet tall, about 20 feet long and over 5 feet wide. It encloses my entire vegetable garden which runs alongside the greenhouse, hopefully protecting it from invasion by any animal more than a centimeter or so in diameter, be it from the sides or from above.

I built it in an afternoon out of treated 2x4's using joist hangers and deck screws. The covering is a 1/2" aviary netting typically sold for the purpose of keeping birds in. The netting is attached to the frame with galvanized staples, and since the netting came in at most 4 foot widths, I tied the edges of the netting together by hand where it must stretch 6 or 7 feet tall. The bottom of the netting is blocked by river rocks and dirt, hopefully keeping the casual digger at bay. Access is provided by a gate made of some redwood lattice attached to the aviary netting by the ever useful artifice of eight plastic zip ties.

So far, I haven't found a bird or beast inside yet - and I have managed to plant several plots of seed and a couple of seedlings which remain unmolested so far. I have high hopes for a squirrel free future.

The #1 news story of the past week in some circles brings to mind a problem of my own in the recent past. This problem no doubt comes to the attention of every tropical greenhouse owner at one time or another, and that problem is rats.

I always scoffed a bit inside at my friends and their stories of rat problems in their greenhouses. After all, they must be living in the wrong neighborhood, or leaving the doors open, or maybe practicing poor plant hygiene, right? I had seen some rat skeletons in the crawl space underneath my home, but had otherwise no hard evidence to back it up. I live near the last remaining corn field in all of the city of Sunnyvale, and my house also backs up on a small creek ( or perhaps drainage ditch ), so I really should have been prepared.

Early this winter, humility was regained as I began to notice some otherwise healthy looking stanhopea orchid leaves, apparently gnawed off and fallen to the floor. And out of the corner of my eye, it appeared that something scampered out of sight as I opened the door to the greenhouse one night. A hole mysteriously appeared and enlarged near the swamp cooler, and I knew that something had to be done ... and fast - before my precious plants became rodent food.

I can well see the attraction - the greenhouse is warm, offers plenty of hiding places, there's good fresh water, and if you like tropical foliage or want to dig for tubers, there is also tons of food.

My attack on the rodent guests was twofold. First, I blocked off their avenues of access with chicken wire ( though I suppose they could still slip or gnaw their way in if they were determined ), and second I set out some rat poison. I won't poison the squirrels which have attacked my garden and eaten my vegetables, but I draw the line at rats. Cuteness is, after all, a perfectly valid survival trait.

In any case, the rat poison mostly disappeared for a few days, as did any trace of the rats. There are no more mysterious bite marks on my orchids, and I have a newfound respect for the need for vermin control in any greenhouse in the late fall.

It's been my experience that rats, squirrels, racoons and such are quite capable of learning where the food and shelter is, and that it's a much bigger effort to deter such an animal once it knows what it wants to do. Hopefully, the poison quashed this particular line of inquiry and the chicken mesh will keep future curious interlopers at bay.

Winter is a great time for the temperate aroids. So many are adapted to a mediterranean climate where the summers are dry and warm, and the winters are wet and mild. More aroids than I can count are putting out their best foliage right now. This helicodiceros is a prime example.

Some potting advice on helicodiceros I recently saw on an aroid mailing list from D. Christopher Rogers would probably apply to just about any of the aroids from the mediterranean coast:

I have my plants as a very generous gift from a buddy. I live 30 minutes northwest of Sacramento on the west side of the California Central Valley at an altitude of about 20 m (65 ft). The USDA Plant Hardiness Map puts me in on the border of Zone 9a and 9b. We sometimes get a maritime influence from the Sacramento River Delta to the south west, keeping us from dropping below 0C (32F) and covering us with maritime fog. However, cold air coming down the valleys in the Interior Coast Ranges to the west will push us down to –2C (28F). This year was particularly cold, and we had two weeks with lows between –5C (22F) and 1C (33F). Normally we have a typical Mediterranean climate, with a hot, dry summer and a cool, wet winter, but this year it has been very dry. The lack of cloud cover has let us drop in temperature. (Although we finally got some rain last night!!!)

I have had the Helicodiceros muscivorus two years now, and in both years they started popping up in January. Last year was very wet, and we had very little frost at all. The small plants pop up first. The frost did not seem to bother them at all. The larger plants began pushing up at the end of January (both years). I have them under a very large, very old butterfly bush (Buddelia davidii), where they receive morning sun from 9 AM to a little after 12. Immediately to the west of them is my greenhouse, and they get light filtered through the greenhouse until 4 PM. Last year, the large plant produced two flowers in May, and I hope to get more flowers this year.

The plants are potted, and are sitting with (also potted) Arum italicum, A. dioscoridis dioscoridis, A. cyrenaicum, A. sintenesii, A. hygrophilum, A. palestinum, Arisarum simmorrhinum, and Dracunculus vulgaris, which are all up. The Dracunculus came up at the same time as the Helicodiceros, but the others have all been up since November. There are also several pots of Arisaema and Pinellia that have not come up yet, and I do not expect them for some time yet.

I pot the bulbs on a layer of sand, with a rich medium of peat, compost, pumice and sand around and on top. The bottom sand layer seems to help prevent rot.

I personally have the tubers in a smallish pot with good drainage. Perhaps not good enough as they don't seem quite as happy as they could be - throwing off lots of little bulbs rather than growing the main bulb. Repotting is probably a project for the summer when they go dormant again.

The Winter of 2006-2007 will be remembered in California by gardeners as one of the cold ones. A quick snap down to the mid 20's, here on the penninsula of the San Francisco Bay was mirrored in much of the rest of the state by temperatures which were enough to damage much of the citrus and avocado crops, as well as hurting the fields of vegetables.

Wandering around my neighborhood, I am reminded why we don't grow certain plants in these parts. Maybe even a decade of mild temperatures will allow the epiphyllums, bananas, and other sub-tropicals to thrive, but a quick hard freeze that might happen once or twice in ten years will turn that sort of landscaping to mush.

The most telling thing about the damage from the cold is the massive variation in amount of damage depending on the exact location. It really brings out the micro-climates. For instance, my epiphyllums on the outer wall of a sheltered courtyard are pretty much toast. My larger collection of epiphyllums in hanging baskets under the south eave of my garage suffered almost no damage. The Clivias planted in the ground near the fence but under the shelter of a tree have mushy leaves. The Clivias on my doorstep are just fine, thank you, and starting to flower.

The point is that not only do microclimates make a difference - I don't have the faintest idea why one particular microclimate is better than another. What seems like a sheltered location under a tree turns into an area of carnage which the the doorstep is more protected than a wall a few feet away. This falls into the somewhat dubious category of information that is useful, but not revolutionary. I can just remember that certan plants do better in certain spots, but with very little idea why.