A Behind-the-Scenes "Sneak Peek" at Some of Logee's R&D Stock Plants

[Music] hi everyone byron martin here at logee's greenhouses and today we're going to be looking at some of the stock plants that we grow here at logee's as well as some of the research and development or r d plants we're always trying new things to try to find new plants that excite us as well as our customers this house runs warm we run it at about 62 to 65 degrees in the winter time and that maintains a really tropical environment with glazing that's really open so we get a lot of light in here so let's let's go and we can look at it right in front of us here we have a fruiting plant that we grow this is the sapidilla or manilcora this is a variety called silas woods which is really a great plant for pots as you can see the plant is covered with fruit here the fruit's just starting to ripen it's kind of odd that it's very hard and then all of a sudden it turns very soft and it's really delicious eating it's like brown sugar they call it but you can eat just grab it off and eat the whole fruit and you can see the productivity of this plant is really high i would say that it's been probably here for about 10 years and we've got what four or five feet on it and it's covered with fruit this is piper nigrum here there's some some fruit forming on some of these older plants right here you can see the peppers that we grow these are some of the abutalons that we're trialing for release we have some of our own hybrids as well as sage reynolds work in here and you know what we do is we watch their growth habit we watch the internodes on them and how freely they flower and then we do our selections from that this is a beautiful foliage plant that's not very often found in the industry this is ficus aspara also known as ficus parcellii this is a clown fig and it's in the ficus family obviously the fig family but it produces a i can show you here it produces a little fig with a little kind of a pinkish almost looks like a beach ball on it it's not edible it's ornamental and it's fairly rare mainly because it doesn't propagate that easily we do it by cutting or layer and it also um has a propensity for spider mite which if you're a grower of that you have to be really on it or it will defoliate right here we have another fruiting plant this is the jabata cobra a polenia cauliflora and this is actually the early fruiting variety of it so normally these plants have to get very large and very old before they stop fruiting but this one actually fruits very freely as a young plant it's probably four or five feet tall now but it's been fruiting since it was two feet the delicious eating is also known as brazilian grape so there's a lot of sugar inside of them and it flowers and fruits for us most of the year shuts down a little bit in the winter time but very productive plant for um containers there's a great plant that we actually are still producing it but we had such demand we can't keep up with it it's xorage of annika which is probably as far as containers go one of the best exorus we've grown it's a little faster growing than the standard exhaust and it flowers pretty much continuously for us throughout the year it also has a very strong root system to resist root rot which some of the other exhausts have trouble with puts out these brilliant orange flowers and yeah it's um it's really a great container plant and great for pots and window sills and such things as that and right here we have our citrus collection or at least part of our citrus collection this contains a lot of different varieties that we've grown over the years some of it's in production some of it isn't but it does contain the reservoir of stock material that we can work with in the future this is um the sun quat which is a wonderful kumquat hybrid the flowers are very sweet on it and it fruits almost continuously for us throughout the year makes a great container plant and the fruit hangs on and the good thing about it is is you can take the whole fruit and eat it whole you can eat like a kumquat you can eat the skin or um you can bite into it like an apple and the interior is not terribly sweet but it's not sour also so it's quite palatable we have our buddha's hand here this is actually more like buddha's fist right here you can see the curling on that our fruit will do that in the greenhouses here i'm not exactly sure why sometimes the fingers come out other times it it's closed in like that and this fruit is you know you can eat the interior of it the pulp that's on the in the rind you can eat that there's really very little seeds inside of it but that's a really good container plant and does quite well for us both that and the citron which down here we have quite a few examples of that here's some of our variegated citrus here this is a pink eureka lemon that's quite available in the trade you can see the fruit right here it's got some stripes in it but as the fruit ripens those stripes will kind of disappear a bit there's our citron up there let's see if i can pick that so this is the regular citron or etrog um and if you cut that open there's a little bit of pulp inside but it's really the rind that is quite edible they put some pretty good size fruit they get bigger if you were in the ground outside in a more subtropical area where they grow we have a variegated navel the tiger navel this is actually really a great naval orange in that it produces and bears for us pretty much every year it doesn't have that off cycle that many of our edibles do there's a fruit of it you can see that the striping goes away as it ripens and it's really quite sweet and delicious it's not a it's a good quality um eating fruit this is the variegated kumquat known as centennial kumquat it's actually interesting it has more of a round of fruit than a regular kumquat but if you raise it and you ripen it you'll see that the inside sour and the peel is kind of sweet and you can eat it as such there's our odor heidi orange the fruit actually hang on for a very long time see these old fruits that have been on they've probably been on here for two years so it makes a great ornamental they can just hang and hang and hang and they don't fall off and actually in the greenhouses when i was younger they'd actually turn green with algae out in our display area where we had an old plant of it it's has an astringency you can eat it's great sweet taste to it and then the aftertaste of it like goes oh my god what did i eat um i eat them once in a while but it's probably not that palatable and so here we have some of our hoya stock we actually have hoyas in several different places because we love hoyers and our customers love warriors and we've just gotten more and more hoyas as time goes on so there's our variegated carry eye that we grow and this is the um that's the heart leaf for you you can see here there's some flowers of it it has an interesting flower there's one that's just beginning to open you see it's open that's very unusual usually they all open at once but this opened one and now it's starting to go inside and open another it's a pretty flower but really they're grown for their foliage this one i really love this is called otter it has that almost looks like it was pounded out of copper somebody did some metallic work on it it's a beautiful leaf flowers are not terribly spectacular on that many different types of hoyers there's carnosa crispr this is the variegated hindu rope you can see one of these is going completely white and that actual white would keep growing as long as the back is feeding it but if you took a cutting off of that and tried to root that it would just perish because it has no chlorophyll these are great plants for people that want something that's going to be around for a very long time and they're not going to actually get out of control so this particular one because of its it's known as carnosa compact it really pulls itself together and doesn't get out of control and many of the hoyers that we grow a lot of them are vines it just kind of you can see see up at the top here they just like take over if you don't watch them this puber this is a great big old plant we have this flowers in the fall has delightfully scented flowers to it it goes in one big burst it's just covered with blooms and then it ends there's our green canosa crispr and that's interesting the leaf has actually lost some of its crispness or twisting which plants often do that so this is carnosa and somewhere along the way it's sported or genetically mutated and sometimes there's a throwback on that that leaf has gotten flat again that we wouldn't propagate from this is uh an interesting plant called hot lips you can see it almost looks like lips this is a psychotria popigana and this particular clone i believe was brought out of ecuador it's a very tall grower um has a long very stretched up internode and we found it to be a little bit difficult to grow here in the northeast it's a plant that we're still working on in terms of trying to get through that winter slump that it goes into this is a great plant for containers this is a dicora sandra pendula and you can see the pendulating flowers on it it flowers over a long period of time the flowers will come down and they'll come out and then another set will come and these bracks of flowers continue to produce blooms as i mentioned over a very long period of time it does grow a bit tall but you simply trim that off and you can maintain a nice compact and bushy plant in a windowsill or in a sun room so above me i have hoya public helix which is probably one of the most infamous or famous warriors in production if you go into a home and you find a hoya that's growing there it's either carnosa or it's public helix and it's a beautiful flower you can see the bloom right here generally for us it flowers in the summertime and it reproduces off of old spurs you see this has been going on for a number of years here at night time it has a light fragrance to it smells a little bit like chocolate it's quite sweet but it is really an indestructible and a great plant if you want to start somewhere with a hoyer and you tend to be a little neglectful with your care of plants this is a great plant to start with this is an interesting citrus citrus histrix or the kefir lime it's used in culinary work you can see it has that double segmented leaf to it it's a fairly strong grower there's a fruit up in the top here which has this kind of crinkled outside edge to it i believe they may use some of it in shampoos and such things as that but it's really not inedible what is important about it is the leaf if you take the leaf off and you crush it it has a really strong citrus fragrance to it and this is what is put into soups and such things in thai cuisine and other southeast asian cooking it's actually a good grower for us it's pretty strong got a good strong root system and tends to have a fairly nice form to it if you you know do a little bit of pruning on it which obviously will add to your cooking endeavors here we have a plant that's um famous in china actually it's aglea odorata and it puts out these tiny little yellow flowers well i don't know what they are they're sort of closed up now but if you look at them under magnification you can see that they do open but that's full bloom for it and it has a little bit of a fragrance the fragrance is on and off and i think that many people that grow this find it disappointing in that it's not fragrant like a jasmine all the time it's also a very hardy grower i mean the plant can take huge amounts of stress in terms of dryness and neglect and so on right here we have our mother plants of jasmine grand duke which is the double sambac you can see the flowers right here on it this one is reliably fragrant all the time there's two clones of it and this is actually the pointed leaf form which has a little more vigor than our round leaf form we're actually going into production on this right now so we're always trying new plants at logee's and one of the tropical fruiting plants that we have been working with is the canistel which is or puetoria is the genus and they actually work pretty good for containers although they're a little bit larger than we would want for a window sill here we have the fruit on one of our canistels right here i believe this is the cult of alcohol fairchild you can see the flowers coming here which are really abundant on the stems in the summertime for us and their tree like this which is it's probably four or five feet tall and well branched it'll put out four or five fruit for us each season this is actually um a chauffeur this is shifler abracola which is actually the dwarf form of shiflera abracola which is very common in the south as a landscape plant the plant itself is very compact as you can see and it actually will make a nice bonsai if you're interested in training plants like that it's pretty much indestructible here we have the beginning of the flower of our medendillar mini otter and this plant will probably never go into production unless it gets into tissue culture because it's kind of hard to root and it's quite slow and as you can see here it's giant i mean the leaf span on that is almost two feet so it's just something that we here at logee's this would be a plant where we just can't produce enough stock plant and then how do you ship something with a leaf span like that so it becomes a bit of a problem but we like to collect unusual plants and i love med and nillas so we keep it around and produce a few of them from time to time this is a interesting plant this is philanthus and gustafolier which is in the euphorbiaceae or the poinsettia family or you euphorbia miliai family it produces flowers along what appear to be leaves but they're actually not the leaf is some tiny little protrusion at the base of the leaf here this is actually the flower stem and you can see the flowers forming it actually will get almost red in bloom when it's in full bloom it's just starting to butt up right now and it has a fragrance of kind of corn chips the fragrance is quite edible we also have our exora odorata here which is a wonderful fragrant tropical shrub has these long flower tubes on it and the smell is quite sweet a little bit more so in the evening but throughout the day it's quite sweet it is somewhat of a big plant you can see the long leaves on it but it does flower for us all summer long i mean it's always in bloom for us we probably get almost nine months of bloom out of that there's kananga frutakosa which is in the lang lang family this is also known known as the dwarf ylang ylang you see the flower here is actually this one's going by a little bit but it turns yellow and kanahanga odorata which is our langlang really is an intensely fragrant plant but this one here has a light fragrance to it somewhat of a fruity smell and unlike odorada which is really hard to root and really grown from seed this one here roots very easily so it's something that can be can be grown as a container plant though so here we have a really productive tropical fruiting plant and this thing puts out like a buckets of fruit every year you can see the cluster of them forming up the air this is spandius stelzis or the in the dwarf form of it the standard form will grow up to about 60 feet this plant gets up to probably about 10 and it makes a great container plant you can see growing in this pot for many years but it produces a tremendous amount of fruit the fruit when it ripens turns yellow i can see some at the top they're just starting to ripen but you have to really let them get very right before they're really good eating um if you eat them when they're green they're sort of like the i saw like a cucumber or something they have a kind of a sour taste to them and not much flavor but if you let them get really ripe so they start to get soft they're actually quite edible there's a large fibrous seed inside so you really just eat the outside of it called june plum it's a good strong grower it's deciduous drops all its leaves in the winter time for us oftentimes there'll be fruit hanging on the tree with no leaves on it and then comes back into obviously growth in the springtime low juice has been growing plants since 1892 hope you enjoyed the tour of our mother plants in our stock greenhouse if you'd like more information visit us at logees.com you

Channel: LogeesPlants

Views: 28,790

Keywords: Logees, Tropical Plants, Greenhouse Plants, Flowers, Home and Garden, How to Grow, Container Gardening, Plant Care, Rare Plants, Unusual Plants, Exotic Plants, Plant store, gardening tips, gardening advice

Id: X2v3FSDGCOc

Length: 17min 20sec (1040 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 29 2020