That's one big whacker of a new shade house, Lisa!
What's that on the roof - shade cloth, plasticy stuff?
That makes sense re the light and fertiliser differences. Your neos certainly look great in there.

Your mammoth new structure makes my new Rion greenhouse look puny.
Oh well....one can dream......

K

Thanks for showing me Lisa! It is beautiful!!

May I ask: Who is this sitting on the right of marmorata a-m? And there are a couple of huge, red ones in the third row. The very open, flat one behind the green johannis/cruenta? And the one furthest to the left with the slight twist in the leaves and seems to be the largest of the lot?

Japie

Uh oh, now I have to remember what is where....

Japie, the big variegate in the front is Roy's Special, it looks like some sort of Meyendorffii on steroids! The others, if I can tell which ones you mean and remember correctly, are both hybrids of mine. The big flat open red one is Brushstrokes and the dark pink twisty one is Girl Talk. Neither one's been registered yet, still in propagation.

It's just shadecloth on top, Kerry. There's another house next to it so you're seeing both roofs together on the left. That one's mostly for Globbas and Curcumas, big summer crops for us.

Here's another pic looking back from the front, where the Vrieseas are:

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It's a nice big house but it filled up immediately as soon as it was finished. I still have a ton of stuff I'd like to bring in but can't without throwing something out! This is all stock, nothing for sale in here, and all of my seedlings have to come in here too, so I've got to cull, cull, cull to make room for them all!

Lisa,

WOW, I just need to convince my wife I need one maybe a quarter of the size...

Rick

Lisa

I am very impressed!!!

Lyndi
Singapore

Yowzers, where's the drool icon?

And I thought Roy's Special is a smallish plant! I got one recently and although not yet coloured up, I thought it was almost mature judging by the fullness of the rosette. We do not get such nice, full stacks of leaves here easily, and when we do, it means the plant is fully grown!

Japie
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Those kind of photos make my jaw drop. Lisa, anything you want to cull, just throw it in a box and ship it to San Diego... : )

Wow, that's quite some operation you got going there Lisa!
Very nice.

Sander

Very impressive! Im totally envious.

So 60% shade cloth eh... Hmm... *gears turning*

C

Gee, I guess you guys have never seen Michael's or Tropiflora, have you? This is small potatoes! The trouble with trying to maintain a wide variety collector-type operation is that you need 3 or 4 times as much space for stock as you do for sales area. That kind of cuts into your return per square foot. If I were just growing them for my own enjoyment I wouldn't need more than one specimen of each cv. so a house like this would be more than adequate....... maybe. ;-)

Chris, there is no magic number. 60% where I live is not going to be the same as 60% somewhere else, because I'm closer to the equator than most of you. It's not even the same as 60% on some other part of the island that gets more (or less) cloud cover than we do, or even 60% on another part of our property where there are more trees around the edge. All those things are going to make a difference, as is humidity, air circulation, etc. You just have to tinker with it until you get it right.

Amen Lisa to the tinkering....thats the hardest part once you get the tinker right...the rest is easy :)

Lisa, do you have a reverse osmosis water supply like Michael? That to me was the most impressive thing he had. A lot of our guys would love to have good water for their neos. The well water here is tough.

Winter I don't know how long ago you were at Michael's but if that is all you noticed you missed alot. Much of the Florida water is pretty foul

We're on city and county water, WL. Hawaii water is generally very good, so we don't need to do anything to it.

Lisa wrote, "Gee, I guess you guys have never seen Michael's or Tropiflora, have you? This is small potatoes! The trouble with trying to maintain a wide variety collector-type operation is that you need 3 or 4 times as much space for stock as you do for sales area. That kind of cuts into your return per square foot."

Rainforest Flora describes their warehouses in N. San Diego County as being multi-level. You have a lot of room between the broms and the ceiling, girl!

I'd like to see pictures of a multi-level brom shade house. It might work for tillandsias but I'm skeptical about foliage broms.

Small potatoes? Not in my book. Although return per square foot is not important to me.

Believe me people if your water is hard and you get calcium crud on your broms reverse osmosis is the way to go. Seedlings also like it better than tap water over here.

Sander

Hi Lisa,
Thanks for shearing your set up with us all. Glad to see some fanastic results for all your effort. We find this all very interesting as we have a 2nd collection of broms at my wifes family home on the equator in Kuching, Sarawak. There we get all year round temps of 30 c with high humidity which Im guessing would be similar to Hawaii. The plants are situated under a large over hanging polycarbonate roof ( So plants only get late afternoon sun), no fertilizer and left to survive off a near daily afternoon rains. In most cases we have found the colour is very washed out compared to here in New Zealand, but we have come across some exceptions as follows.

Images of our plants in Malaysia
First heres a washed out plant which is typical, say 18 plants out of 20, some colour in the center but outer leaves bleached on this N. 'Manoa beauty'
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And then located each side of it firstly N.'Purple star'
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And second generation New Zealand to Malaysia, N.'Cherubs Blush' showing exceptional colour
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So we wonder if you also strike this Lisa ? or does 60% shade give you consistently better colour across all your plants

Those plants look about like the ones in my 40% house, Jaga. I find Manoa Beauty somewhat difficult to get right, anyway. It greens up much too easily with fertilizer. Maybe it'll do better in the new house.

I really didn't intend for this to be about my set-up, but since we're into it I tried to find a picture that shows the 40% house. My photo files are very disorganized at the moment, I'm sure I must have a better one somewhere but all I could find was this one with kitty on top. ;-)

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We have a large population of ferals that like to hang out up there, and the walls tent out for easy climbing! They hang out inside too. They apparently think the black trays are put there for them to sit in and lately I've been finding small kittens in between the plants! The new house is a quonset shape with straight walls and it's better sealed too, so no kitties.

Kim, as you can see I am using some of the upper space for hanging baskets in this one, but we haven't figured out a good way to rig up something similar in the new one. I don't want anything hanging directly over the benches below because the drip from the media is not the best thing for them. Putting that cable up was a real pain in the butt anyway-- it's very heavy duty and whips around like a dragon's tail when you're trying to hold onto it!

Jaga, welcome back. Here is another Manoa Beauty grown in the tropics for comparison.

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At the most recent Bromeliad Society meeting we were presented with the efforts of the state of FL to find a bug that would attack the invasive Mexican bromeliad weevil. They have found a predative fly and deployed it last year in very small numbers, so far, there has been no way to judge success or failure.

Too bad that they can't find any natural predators of feral cats that would be safe to release.

What the ....?
Lisa - it's raining cats and cats at your place!!!! Brilliant photo!!!! LOL

I think you need my Monty to aid the culling process. He would be much more effective than those Hawaiian blind little earthworms - very poor excuses for a snake, and probably only good as snacks for the kittens....

Cheers,
Kerry

Lisa we have been through the cat thing before but are there more now than in the last posting they all stared in??. Han your colour is better than our plant in Malaysia so Im guessing yours is in lower light, ours in NZ end up very vibrant but will still bleach out in mid summer, an example of ours,
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What we dream of is the shape and form of the plant we have in Malaysia plus the colour of the plants in NZ, but anyway we were using the manoa beauty as a example as a 'washed out plant'compared to the 2 surprise plants shown with better colour and were wondering why when all survived in the same conditions?? We assume some have more resistance to bleach out than others. Lisa at 60% shade are you getting good colour in your Manoa beauty's or are they still bleaching?

Guys getting back to Kahala Dawn, I reckon these look much better in bright shade. they get a nice patchy look to them which I find attractive....

I dont have a great pic of one on its own and the camera is poked....so you can see two pretty much in the middle of the picture.

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Yes, let's get back to Kahala Dawn. Anyone else have pictures of how they're growing theirs?

Ok, here is mine. The plant had a nice, dark colour with those green tips when I got it. Advice I got: plant it out of direct sunlight, but bright light. It jus went greener and greener:
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And then I decided to put it direct sun - from about 10h00 untill 15h00 AND foliar fed it. Ok, our harsh summer sun was on it's way out. I fed it twice - a week apart. It started to get some colour and then stopped. So I started foliar feeding again and kept on doing it once a week, and it just got better and better. But now with our really weak winter sun, the colour started fading again, so I stopped feeding.
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I cannot wait untill the sun gets it's power back to see what will happen. I am also planning to build myself a little shade house to see what will happen in there. I do like to have my plants in the garden - part of the landscape and not in a 'show-case'

Japie

Sorry, I meant to add this picture as the last one:
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Ja Japies second pic is the way I prefer them.

Beautiful plants everyone. I cant grow anything in full sun here, even under shade cloth, everything gets heat burn. I suppose the concrete floor is not helping either. Perhaps some fans blowing across the patio?

You bring up a good point, chris. A plant sitting down on the ground on gravel or concrete is much more likely to burn than the same plant under the same light conditions sitting up on an open wooden bench. Air circulation makes a big difference, as does the heat/light reflectivity of the material it's sitting on (or next to). Humidity also plays a big role.

The amount of space above and below is also a large factor