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Greenhouses & Garden Structures

GH Cooking Along Nicely (pix heavy dialups beware)

18 years ago

This year my greenhouse is not nearly as stuffed full of plants as last year, but what I have in there is doing beautifully. I use a portable thermostat and a forced fan oscillating heater. I also have a thermometer with a base station in the house that has an alarm if it gets too hot and use black painted soda bottles with water in them.

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The red oxalis always does incredibly well wintering over in the greenhouse.

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Comments (4)

User
18 years ago
Xeramatheum, good to hear from you and to see your pics. What is the tree next to the Bird's Nest fern? Is it a citrus?

Here are a couple recent pics from my GH.

My new bench, with some new citrus, guava, mango and some other stuff:
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The center bed. I have since replaced the overgrown Musa basjoo with Dwarf Cavs. I have different Jasmines growing up each trellis.
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Xeramatheum
Original Author
18 years ago
Love your new benches. Did you build them yourself?

The plant next to the fern is my neighbors avocado she started from a pit. Since I had plenty of room I offered to overwinter it in the greenhouse for her. It seems to like it since it is putting on new leaves.

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Next to that are cuttings from my Brugmansia that I potted up a few weeks ago. I don't know if you read the Brug forum, but there was a post about rooting Brug cuttings in water with an aerator so I tried it and was astonished with the success! They produced a mass of roots in just 5 weeks! This way of rooting greenwood cuttings succeeded way beyond my expectations. Without the aerator, which keeps the water from going stagnant, I usually end up with rot on some cuttings.

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Do you have problems with ants in your greenhouse? I had a horrible time with pharoh ants last winter & this summer. With a combination of Combat ant baits laid all around inside and painting lavender oil in all the cracks & crevices, they have been virtually no problem this year.

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User
18 years ago
I remember your post about ants and lavender oil. I have a few ants but they only show up where I have scale or mealybug. I sort of use them as markers to lead me to the real nasties. I think at that time you said that you had a different kind of ant there, didn't you? As far as I can tell, mine are harmless. SB
nathanhurst
18 years ago
I tried the lavender oil on ants, and found that even weak solutions, say 1% oil in water, killed ants on the spot. However, the ants were unaffected by walking on lavender oil treated wood after 24 hours. I think the mechanism of operation is suffocation, like pest oil, and thus you may as well use cheap vegie oil and detergent to the same effect.

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