Bonita Bromeliads Nursery Tour!

hey everybody i'm jack barnwell and welcome to a super super exciting little tour today we are down here in southwest florida in kind of rural bonita springs and we are at a really really cool plant nursery propagation grower called bonita bromeliads and we're going to link up with the owner who has really transformed this property into this beautiful bromeliad heaven and we're going to check out a tremendous amount of really really beautiful plants learn a lot about this species the growing the propagation of them and it's going to be a lot of fun i also have to do some bromeliad shopping while i'm here anyway to stock up on a bunch of product for c3 gardens so we're gonna kind of hit two birds with one stone so let's dive in okay so this first shade house that we're in is where they really feature a lot of their finest specimens that come from back in the you know the bigger larger growing greenhouses and shade houses and then as they are really perfect they come out here and are featured so it's a little bit easier to walk through and shop through this shade house if you don't have time to go through the whole entire operation but we're going to take you guys through the whole entire operation today but um like i said i do need to do some shopping while we're here as well and so i'll show you through some of the stuff that's catching my eye right off the bat these neo-mogalys are super pretty look at that color and you can notice how the water holds right in that center there that's called the cup and we'll talk about that a little bit later with matte and how these bromeliads are really designed to hold water and and feed and water themselves through the cup which is really really cool but i'm going to get a couple of those neos for sure i also really really love these casa blancas this upright like wild spotted texture on these is perfect for the container work that we do at c3 gardens they're really cool funky thriller and really tough tough dependable plant these casablancas are super super cool and they also flower with this wildly dramatic beautiful bright flower that's the flower stem kind of coming up there and you can see one is a little further along back here with the flowers on the inside being this like violety purple so very very cool plant casablanca i definitely need to get some of those and look at these blue tango akemia this is a really popular plant for planting in the ground down here in southwest florida you know in a shady kind of protected place in like a a bed of stone or something these are really cool and you can see why i mean the foliage is really pretty it displays itself nicely but the flowers on these are just awesome i mean just electric look at that stem coming up really really tough tough strong flower strong plant too there's not a lot that really you know attacks these as far as pests or anything like that so bromeliads are a great choice for you know your shade garden where you're looking for some color some texture some fun and some funk and a lot of people even up north are starting to get clued in and excited about bromeliads because in the summertime we can plant them as annuals tuck them into planters and again they can handle the shade really really well and they just thrive you know as an indoor plant or a shade plant for a seasonal accent up there and they're wildly funky and fun with that tropical flare to them look at these guys here patricia's secret and it just again just so electric and wild with the variegation and the foliage really really cool wildflower spikes coming out of those so this guy back here is probably the most unique in this entire shade house this is taionensis and this guy has you know the foliage is a little bit softer it still has that serrated edge so you have to be careful handling really any bromeliads because they will rip you up a little bit it still has that kind of sawtooth edge on it but the foliage itself is a little softer and it just has a really really cool habit to it a really awesome landscape bromeliad there and the chartreusey color and stuff is really fun to play with as many of you know i love chartreuse because of the contrast that we can play with with so many other colors so this guy is really cool and very unique and as you can see gets big here's some little pups that were real recently propagated and we're going to talk about how this is done and show you guys through all that as we get into the back green houses where a lot of that work is done but you know we wanted to spend a little time in this first greenhouse to show you some of these guys so here's here's another one silver vase and you can see here this is what are called pups so these little teeny guys that come off of the sort of main stem are pups and you can propagate this plant by slicing those pups off and and making them essentially into new plants and again we're going to dive into that in just a couple minutes [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Music] okay so i have one cart full so far i'm probably gonna get a few more i kind of go nuts in these sort of places and this is a really really fun place to shop but let's pause on shopping go back into the propagation greenhouses and check in with matt the owner and tour through this incredible species and uh and this awesome business here of bonita bromeliads [Music] me [Music] all right so here we're gonna link up with matt bagley the owner and operator of this incredible operation here at bonita bromeliads hey there matt hello welcome so glad you guys came out thanks for having us it's very exciting um come on into the greenhouses i'll show you what we got we call this the magaly house because of one of the hybrids we grow here we sell a lot of these it's called neorgilia magali or neo-magali for short and would you say that's the most popular it's one of the most popular yeah really for the size yeah you can see why this greenhouse at the beginning of season was filled with these really and this is all we've got left now and it's hard to get more i would imagine people go nuts for this like around christmas time yeah yeah or just all year really landscapers love it and i noticed too that these guys they're all full of water yes bromeliads have a tank that holds water and that's they're semi-epiphytes which means they can grow in trees or they can grow in the ground like terrestrials so when they're growing up in trees they don't have any soil to drink from so they just hold water in their tank so they can get their periods of drought they can also take nutrients in through there so you know little leaves and stuff kind of die and they kind of absorb the nutrients out of it and i yeah i mean there's quite a bit of water in there yeah frogs will live in there tree frogs they'll poop in there that's perfect fertilizer for them uh sometimes you know in the wild you know bugs will die in there they're not carnivorous plants but they they do absorb just decaying matter in the rain forest and stuff like that wow so as they get bigger obviously they just hold more and more and more water yeah yeah we can dump out some really big ones if you want to see how much they hold yeah i got soaked earlier when i picked one up and uh it was very foggy last night and i think it was almost like a rains for them so they're full right now how many different varieties do you have here good question um every time we finish a inventory we have by the time we're done counting there's different stuff already so oh my gosh um i'd say there's around 100 and something different varieties uh hybrid species most of them are hybrids that's what people like yeah they're more colorful stuff like this this is a hybrid of the common silver vase bromeliad called fasciata acme of fasciata which you'll see those at like grocery stores hospitals and stuff yeah this is a hybrid that also has elbow margination so it's i kind of like growing the ones that are more unusual yeah this one i was just gonna say this one is really really unique here super cool very cool i mean it's got this awesome like cup you know and real tight habit too yeah bill bergia very vertical um quite epiphytic they do better in pots of there's actually no soil in these i'm not sure if you've pointed that out before this is all just like leaf matter and bark and stuff so these guys will grow up in like the crevices of trees and stuff they'll grow straight up they'll hold a lot of water these are a type of bilbergia which are also called queen's tiers we've got some blooming up back i can show you but they'll put up a flower and it kind of hangs down and they call it queen steers yeah and you can see here some of the little pups as you call them right yep coming up little offshoots coming out and here's another one with a nice healthy pup coming off of there full of water and these ones will bunch up you know if you let them you'll get a nice cluster of like 10 or 15. okay and uh the only reason you would have to ever repot them is because if they get too heavy and the pot falls over they don't get root bound they're totally happy being in a tight little space like that with their roots that's awesome and i know that a lot of people and it's getting more and more and more popular to use bromeliads as an indoor plant because they you know they're colorful they're very easy to care for and stuff like that what would you say is the best you know variety of bromeliads to use indoors either in icmia or neo-rigelia pretty much anything in this house is great for indoors wow but a lot of different things uh work indoors especially if you have morning sun coming in through the window um or if you can put in like uh like a high color temperature led light like 5000k or higher they really like that i have customers that live in like minnesota they say in the winter they move all the vermilions into the garage they just put in these led cheap regular led lights yeah 5000 or higher 6500k and they just grow them all went all winter long in their garage and they put them out in the spring wow no kidding in minnesota yeah yep that's awesome oh here we got some queens tears blooms coming in this is related to that other one you were looking at we looked at some of these in the first greenhouse that we're blooming this one's just starting to bigger though go over there a little so that's going to come up and hang down so these work great actually in hangers because the blooms hang down like that oh yeah i didn't even think about that like in a little hanging basket or something like that that could arc out and spill out yeah it's really really cool cool there's another one back here they're just getting started oh yeah most familiar blooms last for months and months however these only last a few weeks once they're mature this purple one next to it that will last for six months that's not even done blooming yet that's gonna get much bigger six months i mean oftentimes i get clients asking me to you know what's the best perennial or the best shrub that i can plant that's going to bloom the longest you know because everybody wants flowers right they want color but they you know if it only blooms for a week or two it's kind of a dud yeah so six months i mean you get a lot of value a lot of bang for me that's it and then in the following years you'll get a nice cluster and you'll have multiple blooms coming out of it yeah because it'll just keep sending pops and be like a nice yeah thick wow so what zone will most of these bromeliads survive in uh year round most of them will the ones i grow i grow specifically because they do well here this is a 10 okay or arguably a 10b there are bromeliad societies up in orlando they do pretty well it's a little bit tougher up there for outdoors uh down in the keys you can grow anything there are bromeliads that are so tropical that i can't grow them here really yeah so um i'll get in some exotic stuff sometimes it doesn't do so well yeah i just won't keep growing it because i don't want you know to cause my customers any more trouble than they need so most of the stuff will just grow itself well yeah they all seem to be really really happy here you're doing such a good job and this is the hardest time of year for them it's it's pretty dry for the most part it's cold it's cool cooler but they still most of them do really well even in the winter in the summer they super they thrive absolutely though so these big ones these are more of a uh sun loving like landscape style bromeliads yes right all bromeliads will do great in morning sun uh-huh some of them will will thrive in all day some like these ones out here can handle all day something they don't need it they can actually survive in very low light conditions they'll just be less colorful okay so in the full sun this guy can take the full sun and heat of of the summer and everything yeah wow no kidding yeah everything out here and there's just such wild contrast these those ones have spectacular blooms there's none blooming right now but sometimes when you see them and they the foliage doesn't look super colorful it's a good indicator there's probably a cool bloom there's a reason i'm keeping it around or like these ones over here the odoratus there's a real big one of these up front um these get just huge and they're super they're just invincible yeah they'll just grow and grow really really popular landscape plant down here the odorata and you know it's almost you see a lot of landscapers using them because it is a great plant it's tough it's got great form and everything but to see some other varieties and stuff like that to diversify it up a little bit here here we go we've got so many options it's really cool yeah they make for good contrast they got the silvery sort of thing here you can see some hair pups so these these they're called alcantara odoradas these pop a little differently than most of the bromeliads they get these tiny little pups and you pull them off and they already got some roots on them so i'll plant these in about two or three years i'll have a plant this size okay i'll come back for that later yeah this one caught my eye when i first walked into this shade house this thing is incredible carricia uh roy holmberg's yeah karisia roy fudge ripple is what everyone calls it fudge ripple so it's full sun and these ones especially like if you hold up the one next to it see all the the ones hanging down yeah so these ones are ones i recommend in hangers or mounting to a tree because they're supposed to have these hangers right you're not supposed to cut those off on this variety so you have a vertical going up and a vertical going down they look really really good mounted in trees oh yeah you can see how they you know they really open up like yeah excellent for palm trees you can just tie them on there with some landscaping wire and they'll attach themselves after a month or so yeah that is so cool and this one so this all of these really are showing that they've got some pretty solid and significant pups yeah we can trim some of those off if you'd like to show you how to propagate do you want to do one of these yeah absolutely okay cool we can uh we can pop right over here do you want to do it or you want me to do it you do the first one okay here get this let's see how much water is in this thing all right not too bad so the easiest way it's probably actually to take the whole thing out of the pot so you have to the roots kind of stick to the side oh yeah i know that technique well and then you can see that it looks root bound but permeates don't care their new roots will just grow through their old roots it's kind of crazy and then if you can kind of see this one's this one is big enough usually i'd wait until they're a little bit bigger um but you kind of want to get the clippers right in between the mother plant and the pup this one's the roots are actually going to be the hardest part to cut on this one this is something i might use actually as a sawzall for normally but i can cut through these roots uh-huh yeah a sawzall or like a hand pruning yeah even just a hand saw to get the roots and that won't affect the mother plant at all she doesn't know she doesn't and they don't even really get root uh shocked when you transplant them there we go boom so that's off you can toss this back in here mother won't care she might miss him a little but um so then you've got this cut here and normally i'll wait a day before i putt this to allow callus tissue to form over the cut and that will greatly reduce the chance that bacteria could get in there okay so just the air will callous that up air will callous it up that's it i'll just leave it on the side for a day all right and these little bit of roots coming off there that's all it really needs that's a really it doesn't even need that you can you can plant a bermula edward pup with no roots it'll always root itself automatically and do you have to peel off a bunch of these you don't have to you can clean it up as much as you'd like yeah um but usually i don't usually i don't do much like the less is better because as those break down they're just going to feed the plant anyway yeah and as long as there's water in here you don't even have to have soil like you could just i could leave this for two or three months and the plant would survive it'd be fine so awesome wow no kidding yeah but from there you would normally i mean for for production yes in propagation you would normally kind of tuck it into yeah um a pot and if you're doing you know 100 of them at a time or something like that yeah we got our putts here uh this is actually the stuff that's too big to fit in the little putts that's why that's like we'll shred that up or use it for bigger pots [Music] so what what is the for that particular bromeliad what is the soil let's go walk over that way and i'll show you my big pile of shredded palm you could use a variety of stuff anything from lava rock to peat moss a mixture of perlite vermiculite some people just grow them in gravel you know pretty much anything will work i use this because we're in florida there's palm trees everywhere so this is palm fronds and like old old palm trees that are getting removed and getting chopped down anyway so i call up a company that shreds all this stuff and they just dump it here and this works great yeah and that's that's that's the soil mix essentially the soilless mix that you that you're using and essentially this is the same structurally as coco core which is big in the hydroponic industry and as well as the reptile keeping industry they use this stuff so if you're somewhere where you can't get shredded palm trees you can buy coco coir especially like the the rougher stuff the cocoa chips that's the best stuff you can grow bromeliads in so that's it yeah this yeah product in a pot packed in there yep and that little pump oh yeah he'll root right in there root right in there and be happy as heck and usually because the cup is where all the water is stored anyway yeah so it doesn't really matter if there's any moisture in here they do like some moisture in there the roots will grow better and it'll hold a little bit yeah it will but they don't like soggy stuff like if you just use regular dirt that could cause rotting in certain varieties okay yeah this is obviously gonna drain like crazy instantly yeah and breathe really really well awesome hold on but you gotta see these this is another one that i'm not selling but it's my favorite you got to see these look as you can't have look at this i someday i'll be selling them i mean just this is definitely your favorite they're just starting to get this red color in these are alcantara brazilians this red oh my god which i have not seen at any other nurseries i got some of my plants i get from collectors that i found through facebook or and these don't have any of the thorns on them at all yeah alcantaras are thornless wow they're related to the verisias which are in the front house which are very delicate these are like the tough version they branched off from verisia and they became full sun large they grow on cliff faces in rocks yeah you'll see like in brazil a a mountainside and these will just cover it in the little cracks between the rocks they'll be growing out of it jeez at elise and you only have these five or so yeah and then these this is my other favorite these are uh cacaridon giant carrot on tiger that's that striped one i like the tiger carried on silver and then we got rainbows up back i'll show you carry on rainbow look at how big these spines are so the the the legend goes all these cacaridons were found in a garbage dump in brazil growing at the dump and no one's found them anywhere else in nature supposedly they're awesome i really like the tigers these are yes super cool do so we do this because that's coming out of a well so the well water straight out it's got too much iron in it then it will give the bromeliads a little bit of a red sheen so we fill up the pond the iron settles out and then we water from the pond oh cool so this is such a beautiful spot out here and it used to be wholesale only right yes and now you've opened it up so that it's open to the general public yeah people are doing retail shop to their hearts design oh yeah they can hang out yeah it's a beautiful place to just hang out absolutely this is an order i got ready this is going out today oh cool well we'll share the address and links and information and everything at the end of the video here so that anybody that's in the area visiting passing through or anything like that can stop in and see matt this is one i cannot even keep in stock called jeffrey neo jeffrey block i can see why and these get bigger too these get like yeah that's cool and just a little bit of pink on there super pretty yeah in full sun it will get a lot of that pink that'll handle full sun yeah that's right that's one of the reasons they're so hot so many more bromeliads that can handle the sun than you think yeah this is what you'd mostly see right blanchettiano yeah and these even come in a lot of different colors that's the orange aid form yeah orange aid's probably the most popular there's a raspberry form there's a bunch of new ones coming out too well it's a great plant you know everybody's looking for something super tough yeah and this is one you'll see growing all the way up into like tallahassee area people plant these maybe even southern georgia they're so tough so these are the female form of that plant uh androlopa skinner i was showing you and we've even got one flowering back here it's not really a beautiful flower but it's cool i see hummingbirds and stuff coming at it sometimes butterflies like them and then these are all this is my collection of the the carrot on it's a neora jelly i could carry it on rainbow and you can see they're getting more color back here because they're getting more sun yeah their colors dramatically different in the sun and these look gorgeous in a landscape they could use some cleaning up i haven't been back here in a while but you can just basically rip the leaves off you know the dead ones they pull right off yeah so it seems like these plants are so uh you know they're easy to grow easy to maintain yes why why aren't there more bromeliad growers why aren't there more people getting into it it's getting more popular absolutely and there's more hybrids coming out every year you know there's it's certainly it goes in phases like landscaping is like fashion so they were really big you know back when they were first brought back from south america in like the 1940s right they got huge for a while they kind of died back they came back in the 60s and the 80s there was a resurgence and now it seems like there's another resurgence okay coming around yeah i mean anybody's looking for plants that are drought tolerant you know water savvy and give you a lot of color with you know not a lot of fuss yeah so kind of a great solution plant for a lot of places down here anyway i was planning on growing when i got this place different types of plants and stuff but i just love bromeliads i just fell in love with them so much i just everything else i was growing i'm like nope nope more we need room for bermuda get rid of them like all these cactuses and succulents i'll keep some cactuses because i love them but uh succulents i'm getting rid of if you want them cheap i'll give them your cheap but i need all this space for bromeliads i don't i've never really loved cactus uh they're tough in south florida because of how rainy it is yeah so i've been experimenting and some of them do well so it looks like a whole lot more bromeliads over here too yeah this is our propagation area i didn't want to be propagating anything in the greenhouses it felt like a waste of space and this was all invasive basically um brazilian pepper over here so i just had it cut all down and now i got all the space for all my propagation so all of these plants are just sitting out here doing their thing yep waiting for a home yeah and they'll do just fine i mean you throw these big ones on their side they'll pop faster because they want water and they know they have to be facing upward so basically that mother plant shoots out that pup just to catch water for itself yeah okay yeah so all of these are thrown on their side on purpose yes because then they they yeah they are shooting a lot of pups out you can't do it with all of them but these big long ones you can and then you can come through and just slice slice slices yeah yeah something that size ready it's ready for a three gallon pot oh yeah these are really pretty yes these are super cool that's really really nice yeah really you know once it's cleaned up and stuff that's a nice looking little plant yeah yeah yeah they got thrown out here because they were a little got junky looking but the pups will look good yeah this is like a voodoo doll variegated voodoo doll i don't think that looks junky i mean now it doesn't it did when it got thrown out because like this was the new growth when i put it out here yeah now it's got fresh yeah like these are starting to look really nice they look really good and so just sitting out here none of these are in pots or anything yeah they're just sitting out here with a little bit of natural leaf cover and everything like that keeping them happy and you can see they're sending out pups like crazy they just grow and we do have some irrigation here to encourage pup growth but i'll show you some areas where we have no irrigation and they're still growing it's a little bit slower i was here for two years and uh the hurricane came in blew down all the tables knocked over all the plants filled this whole place up with water like two feet high three feet high in some places and i basically lost all the plants i had been saving up for those two years and i couldn't even work more salvageable or anything a few things like the blanchettion is they're invincible but most of the stuff like the shade clock blew off so the lower light ones got burnt and the rest of them just fell under water and it was the water was here for months and months and months so i couldn't even come back here to work and clean up for like at least three or four months yeah so it was pretty rough but i kept going and i'm open again so that's good wow i guess so it looks beautiful i mean it really really looks beautiful it's such a treat to the eye to be able to walk through here and see all this color and you know i've been down here now for six or seven years with my c3 gardens company and we use a lot of bromeliads in our work but i had you know i had no idea there was this much variety and that frankly there were plants that could be you know this perfect and this well cared for because a lot of the stuff that you find you know in most of the nurseries and stuff like that is not nearly this good a quality yeah especially the big box stores they don't really know how to take care of them no like you'll see them under like just shade so as soon as someone brings that home and even in mornings and puts it out it's not going to be used to the morning sun right it's going to burn or die a lot of them come pre-killed well and they're packed in really really tightly and stuff like that so they don't have a lot of air this is one of my best customers over here jackie how much do you love bonita bromeliads yes the best parts the plants are in terrific shape always they're never ratty [Music] there's such a variety i moved here from the north 10 years ago and i knew nothing about vermillions and to the dismay of your husband sometimes yeah yeah i sneak in my son and i are both familiar with people oh that's cool it's a great plant to get addicted to nursery service is wonderful the quality of the plants is really really nice we're big fans thank you so much okay well i've got to finish up some shopping to get my truck loaded up for things that i need for c3 gardens a huge thank you to matt for this incredible tour of bernita bromeliads again if any of you are in the area or planning on any travel in southwest florida be sure to stop by and see matt and check out this incredible operation here because it's definitely a sight to see come on bye [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Jack Barnwell Design

Views: 70,528

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Id: gclaMeWKkU4

Length: 37min 59sec (2279 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021