Albert's Greenhouse

You may have noticed that most of the posts on this blog are about the plants I grow, or see, or whatever. Operative word being that the posts are on the plants. This post, along with a few I'm contemplating, is different. It's about some greenhouse hardware.

I've wanted to be able to post realtime temperature data ( and more... ) on my alsgh.com website for a while now. I mostly just want to be able to keep track of things when I'm away from home, but I think that the temperature trends in my greenhouse might be interesting to others who are trying to grow the plants that I grow.

Meanwhile, I've been working on a 2nd, very small, highland tropical greenhouse, for those plants that are from cooler, higher altitude regions of the tropics and therefore requiring of cooler days and nights. My intent is to provide a maximum daytime temperature of around 75F and a minimum nighttime temperature of 45F or so. As part of this project, I looked into new ways to monitor the greenhouse temperature.

In my hot house, I have a remote thermometer/hygrometer from Oregon Scientific which transmits to a receiver in my bedroom. That way I can see the temperature every day and make sure things haven't gotten out of hand. The thermometer sensor is at the very edge of its radio range here, however, and it sometimes fails to give a reading. The new cool house is located somewhat further away, so I figured that a similar setup would not work.

I started to look into the possibility of putting a small computer in the new greenhouse and using that to monitor the temperature and more. I found the FitPC Slim, which is a very tiny computer that runs Windows XP, has 3 USB ports, a VGA port, an Ethernet port and WiFi. It's made by an Israeli company that normally does embedded computers. It goes for about $350 on amazon.com. I also found the TEMPerHum USB stick that's made by a Chinese company called Shenzen RDing Tech. It's not officially imported into the USA by anyone, but you can get it online shipped from Hong Kong for about $25.

It took me a while to get some working software for the stick, but in the end, everything worked out pretty well, and I now have almost realtime temperature monitoring online. You can read more about the setup on my greenhouse pages.

You may remember from my last post that I sowed some spores of a couple Lecanopteris ant ferns a couple weeks ago - that being my first spore propagation attempt ever.

The results are not in yet, but there is some green stuff growing in the dishes:



Perhaps it's algae? Perhaps it's a prototypical prothallus? Only time, or a microbiologist commentator will tell...

Somebody wrote me and asked me about my Lecanopteris mirabilis yeasterday. It's a tropical ant-fern with plate-like rhizomes under which ants can live. It's also a very beautiful plant, and something of a headache since I've never been able to get it to root well from cuttings. The cuttings will survive on their own for a remarkable number of months, but they seem to be hesitant to grow.

In any case, this person was looking to get the plant, and mentioned that if I had some mature fronds ( with spores ), he or I might be able to propagate it that way. So I went out to the greenhouse, looked around a bit, and found a fertile frond. This inspired me to try something I've never tried before - growing a fern from spores.

I've always been confused by the fern life cycle. They generate spores, each spore can grow into a little tiny plant called a prothallus, which then generates male and female sexual cells, which then combine with each other and form a new fern. This has always bugged me - it's way too indirect or something, I guess.


So I picked off a frond from my Lecanopteris mirabilis, and put it on a piece of white paper on top of my chest freezer. Almost immediately, what I assume are spores began to be launched out of the spore patches. And by launched, I mean that they seem to actually be propelled some distance away from the frond ... I prepared a substrate by putting some sort of sterilized peat from a jiffy peat pellet into a plastic petri dish, and then shook some of the spore material off the paper and onto the peat.


The petri dish is now sitting on a shelf in my germination area, and I'm waiting for the prothalli to form. I guess we'll see what happens.

I took some photomicrographs of the spore material that I collected. There are little alien-looking brown things, sort of yellow spherical globs, and a bunch of white hairs. I'm assuming that the yellow spheres are the spores, the alien brown things are somehow related to releasing the spores, and the hairs are just there for decoration.

The last stop on our conservatory tour of Kew is the Princess of Wales Conservatory. Covering an area larger than the Palm House, yet seeming quite modest from the outside, this very modern building is an exercise in design for energy conservation. The climate control is all computerized, and as you walk through the 10 different climate zones ( some are just little rooms ), you can hear the vents opening and closing to almost passively keep the temperature in a good range.

There's a desert environment, a fernery, a high altitude section, and a large tropical area. When we visited, they had a huge Amorphophallus titanum on display, along with a revolving selection of orchids in flower.



One more thing we noticed on our visit was that some of the maintenance staff was dealing with an overgrown tree ... and on closer inspection, we recognized a couple of them from the television show. They very kindly took a little time out of their day to pose for a picture with us.


This conservatory was perhaps my favorite - although I was really happy to finally walk the aisles of the famous and historic Palm House and Temperate House, the plant displays in the Princess of Wales Conservatory were perhaps more interesting for me. The layout of the many different environments meant that you saw something new past each bend in the path and over each hill, and the stunning variety of plant life from different climates kept my interest from beginning to end.

The waterlily house, which is the only other functioning public conservatory at Kew right now, was closed for the winter ... in the summer it houses Victoria waterlilies and other plants that like ultra-hot tropical conditions. It shares a heating system with the Palm House that's next to it. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to visit when it's open.

The Temperate House at Kew is the largest ornamental glasshouse in the UK, at 52,000 square feet. Construction was started in 1860, but not completed for many years due to funding difficulties. The main center block and the octagons at each end were built between 1860 and 1862. The end blocks were added between 1860 and 1899. In many ways it's a similar plan to the palm house, but much more blocky and square. There's a big tall central area and then two shorter wings off to the sides.

The temperate house re-creates a temperate environment - most of the plants inside seem to be from coastal mediterranean parts of the world where it gets cool, but does not freeze. For me, this means that many of the plants are familiar as landscaping around the San Francisco Bay Area, and therefore perhaps not as interesting as those in the tropical or alpine houses. There are certainly a lot of palm trees.

The Temperate House is somewhat off the beaten path, and seems not to be as popular as the Palm house or the Princess of Wales Conservatory, at least. It is worth the walk, however, if only for the architecture. The structure was renovated between 1972 and 1980, and is still looking pretty good.

The Palm House is iconic of Kew in a way that few other buildings are. It's not the biggest ( That would be the Temperate House ), and it's not the Oldest ( Maybe the Orangery or the Nash Conservatory, formerly the Aroid House ), but in many ways it's the most graceful, and it's the first thing you see when you pay your money and walk into the main entrance.

Completed in 1848. Restored in 1957, over 100 years later. Restored again in 1988. Designed by Decimus Burton, built by Richard Turner. Wrought iron and glass in the form of an upturned ships hull. It's beautiful and impressive now - just think how it must have looked to someone in 1865 London.

The public face of Kew's tropical collection is housed here - palm trees, tropical flowers, and nice wide aisles. The collection is large and well grown, especially the palms and cycads. It's here, at one end, where you can find the Encephalartos altensteinii, a cycad which has been in captivity since 1773.

Both the Temperate House and the Palm House have convenient 2nd story walkways which allow a visitor to view the canopy from above. Most of the plantings are in raised beds rather than pots.



The palm house has a marine collection down in the basement where the heating apparatus used to be. It's nothing like our local Monterey Bay Aquarium, but it does have a nice exhibit of what I presume to be local sea life.

The Alpine House is probably the newest greenhouse at Kew, and it serves two purposes which are almost the opposite of what a greenhouse is normally considered to be for: it keeps the plants DRY in the winter, and it keeps them COOL in the summer.

I have spent most of my life living in ignorance of the requirements of alpine plants - I always figured that they needed it cooler than normal, but I did not realize that so many could be grown at lower elevations simply by giving them good drainage, a dry winter, and a relatively cool summer growing season.

In fact, these conditions (sans the dry winter) are basically available in my backyard, and in fact the Alpine House at Kew seems to house a remarkable number of plants like Helicodiceros which are NOT alpine, but are from coastal mediterranean climates somewhat like my own.

Apparently, the soaring glass roof and a huge heat sink underneath the structure combine to keep things cool during the long summer days without using an undue amount of electricity. In fact, the cooling arrangements for most of the glasshouses at Kew seem to be fairly efficient since many of them date from before the introduction of electric fans to the greenhouse industry.




I have to say that some of the plants in there I had not seen in person before, or even necessarily heard of, and they did have some really cool leaves. Might be time for me to start an alpine collection.

I've been putting off posting about my visits to Kew in the spring of 2008, for several reasons. It's a huge place, it's an historical place, it was the last major botanical event of the trip, and in many ways it was more than simply a visit to a botanical garden for me personally.

Any discussion of Victorian plant exploration cannot avoid mention of the history of this place - the herbarium where plant specimens taken by Darwin, Hooker and pretty much every plant explorer since are stored - the glasshouses where rubber seeds liberated from Brazil by Richard Spruce were grown out before being shipped on to Sri Lanka - a potted plant collected before the Declaration of Independence was signed - all this and so much more of the very roots of botany is here.

Not to mention three years of a gardening reality show was filmed here. I'm a big fan of both Victorian botanical history and A Year at Kew. But more on that later.

Kew's not cheap and it's not close to the center of London. Out in Zone 3 on the District Line, Kew Gardens station is still part of the underground - but it's far. I estimate spending over $60 to get the two of use over there and inside the gardens ... and we went on two separate days.

We came at both a good time and a bad time of the year. The lawns were carpeted with early bright blue flowers, rhododendrons were just starting to come in to bloom, and we managed to hit a day when the meager sunlight was in fact visible through the clouds. On the other hand, the many of the lawns were more like swamps, the wind was bitterly cold, the sun set at what seemed to be an exceptionally early hour, the trees were bare and the Waterlily House was closed for the season. All the more reason to try to come back in summer this year, I guess.

Living in Northern California, we've come to regard February as about the last we'd expect of winter if we're going to get any at all. It's kind of like spring year-round here. Not so much in England.

Continuing the set of pictures and narrative from our trip last Spring... Columbia Road Flower Market is held on Sundays in East London. Since my wife was interested in seeing the many food markets that London has to offer, I was able to sneak in a visit to this large, weekly horticultural market not too far from Brick Lane.

When visiting a foreign country, or even just the next town over, I like to spend a little time looking at whatever plants they may have for sale. In some countries, it's just gathered medicinal herbs and some farmed produce, and in others you get a wide variety of sometimes unidentifiable but decorative specimens.

I'd have to say that this flower market in London boasted a lot of well-grown material, yet nothing much that we couldn't find back home. There were plenty of cut flowers, bedding plants and even tropicals. The emphasis was more on plants suited for a slightly cooler climate than ours, which makes a lot of sense.

They did have a few surprises such as this cart of sarracenia and succulents ... The plants themselves are not so surprising, but one gets the feeling that they actually felt they might sell this many plants to the public on a single rainy Sunday at the end of March.

I did a little experiment in Anthurium seed sowing in the late summer last year. I have an Anthurium bakeri which is self-fertile and as a result provides me with large quantities of berries pretty much year-round.

I was trying to figure out whether the substrate made a big difference is seed longevity, and whether I needed to remove the pulp from around the seeds before sowing ( which can be an arduous task. )

I sowed two sets of seed on a peat/vermiculite substrate, and two sets of seed on a long fiber sphagnum substrate. One set on each substrate had the berries completely washed off and the other just had the berries crushed a bit.

Germination of Anthurium from fresh seed can be quick but the subsequent growth of the seedlings can be excruciatingly slow. So far, it appears that substrate is not effecting the growth rate, but that berries sown on the long fiber sphagnum without removal of the pulp did not germinate.

There's been an interesting thread on some favorite methods of Anthurium seed sowing recently on Aroid-L. You can find it here.

So, I'm watching this episode of The Private Life of Plants, and they're out on some coastal South African meadow watching bumble bees pollinate a particularly interesting flower. It's got yellow colored tubular stamens, and though it looks like there's pollen one them, the pollen is actually secreted way down inside the flower somewhere. The bumble bee knows the secret, though - it just has to buzz at the right frequency when it's on the flower, and pollen will come shooting out of the stamens.

And I'm thinking that this is a neat strategy. The flower conserves pollen for its chosen pollinators. Quite similar to the way many orchids require a specific stimulus to release their pollen sacks. So cool, in fact, that I might just want to get a plant like that for myself.

Well, after some online research, I realize that I have a plant like that myself. And you probably do to. It turns out that tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and even blueberries work this way.

In fact, greenhouse growers of tomatoes used to shake the flowers by hand to encourage good fruit set, until they discovered that bumblebees will work for cheaper than humans...