[ Lost in the Landscape ]

why a greenhouse?

I find that I’m ask­ing myself whether I need the green­house any­more. Left over from an obses­sion with warm-growing orchids a cou­ple decades ago, it sits in the mid­dle of some prime real estate in the every-shrinking back yard.

Its cur­rent incar­na­tion is more shed than green­house, with bags of pot­ting mix and pots tak­ing up most of the space. Still I con­tinue to use it for some prop­a­gat­ing. Because of the famous green­house effect tem­per­a­tures inside dur­ing the day­time can climb ten to twenty degrees higher than outdoors–and that’s with heavy shade­cloth on the west­ern expo­sure. Even at night it stays a lit­tle warmer than the out­doors. Before sun­rise dur­ing a cold snap a week and a half ago I looked at the ther­mome­ter inside: 42 degrees. Pretty cold, but it was but four to five degrees higher than a nearby ther­mome­ter outside.

The extra warmth can help seeds ger­mi­nate a few days ear­lier than out­doors. And once the plants are up they can grow quite a bit faster. The warm spa tem­per­a­tures inside the green­house, com­bined with some pro­tec­tion from maraud­ing nature, can give you a leg up on the season.

If you’re occa­sion­ally impa­tient like me it’s nice to see big­ger plants sooner.

And this last photo shows another advan­tage of the extra warmth. These are year­ling seedlings of the North Amer­i­can pitcher plant, Sar­race­nia. All three pots were started in the green­house a year ago, but the one in the mid­dle spent most of the sum­mer out­side in strong sun­light. These plants are sup­posed to like the intense light, but you can see that they were more par­tial to tem­per­a­tures that reminded them of the South than intense sun. For plants that ordi­nar­ily take five years to mature, it’s look­ing like the extra warmth can take a year or two off of the usual time. It’s cool to have a green­house to save a few weeks but hav­ing it help shave one or two years is pretty persuasive.

So as I talk myself through all this it’s look­ing like I’ll still want to have some sort of green­house, even in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. But it might not be this really inef­fi­cient and poorly located green­house. And did I men­tion that the cur­rent build­ing has termites?

The replace­ment might be sep­a­rate lit­tle struc­tures. Maybe they could be enclosed carts and have wheels so that they could be repo­si­tioned to take advan­tage of the best sun angles. And if they’re on wheels they could be stuck in a cor­ner of the yard if they’re not being used for prop­a­ga­tion. And some­thing like a cart wouldn’t waste space on aisles to walk down.

Well, there are lots of pos­si­bil­i­ties, and I’ll be think­ing about what to do. I’m one of those peo­ple who likes to stare at a prob­lem for a long time, but maybe in a few months you’ll be read­ing about the next big gar­den con­struc­tion project.

December 12 2010 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: greenhouse effect • greenhouses • propagation • seedlings | 6 Comments »

in the greenhouse, or, the dictator’s wife

I was in the green­house Fri­day morn­ing, water­ing some pots of seedlings. It seemed funny for a sec­ond, because out­side the green­house it was rain­ing. If I hadn’t gone in there with the hose that morn­ing, the seedlings would have died in the desert for lack of water.

(Left, a Euphor­bia chara­cias ssp. wulfenii out­side the green­house, bloom­ing away in the rain.)

I used to grow and breed pha­laenop­sis orchids in the green­house. It was gonzo amounts of work to keep up with repot­ting hun­dreds of plants. And try­ing to con­coct an envi­ron­ment that would fool the orchids into think­ing that they were in the low­lands of the Philip­pines instead of the flats of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia wasn’t that easy either. In addi­tion to all the work, the green­house was an energy pig, tak­ing as much nat­ural gas to heat as the entire house.

So, end of orchid obses­sion. End of heat­ing the out­doors and wast­ing all that energy. (The New York Times has a recent piece on a cou­ple who decided to build them­selves a green­house. Their heater hasn’t arrived yet, but they’re already way over budget.)

Now that the trop­i­cal orchid episode of my life has ended the green­house is only heated by the sun via the green­house effect. At this time of year it’s handy to have a spot that will help give young plants a head start on spring. That’s pretty much how I use the green­house now.

And, um, yes, for a place to store gar­den clut­ter. Sort of a gar­den shed with windows…

For­tu­nately the win­dows are an opaque fiber­glass, so all the mess inside is obscured. Maybe even a lit­tle mys­te­ri­ous and poetic. Here are some pot­ted plants as seen from the outside.

As I was water­ing the plants in my lit­tle arti­fi­cial out­door desert I thought back to the 1980s. One the sto­ries from the news that has stuck in my brain all these years was a report on Michèle Ben­nett, the wife of Haiti’s dic­ta­tor, Baby Doc Duva­lier. The cou­ple was bad news all around, and one of Michèle’s vices was that she’d refrig­er­ate a part of the palace so that she and her friends could strut about in the fur coats that they col­lected. (Com­pared to her husband’s bru­tal ways, it all seems pretty minor, of course.)

Mink and fox and chin­chilla coats in Haiti. About as ratio­nal as a green­house full of warm trop­i­cal orchids in San Diego, I thought.

I guess we all want a lit­tle of of what doesn’t come eas­ily or nat­u­rally. But in an age of a grow­ing aware­ness of the need to live greener it’s good to stand back and see what we really need.

January 25 2009 | Categories: gardening | Tags: green living • greenhouse effect • greenhouses • Michele Bennett • orchids • solar energy • watering | 5 Comments »