Logee's Longhouse Greenhouse Tour — Ep 171

so I'm at the front entrance here of logee's and Danielson Connecticut and Byron is going to give us a tour of the longhouse so this is the house that is actually open to the public but they have some really good foliage plants and also some flowering plants so that's what we're gonna see [Music] howdy hey you ready for the tour ready oh wow how long have you had the longhouse oh it was built in the 1920s and we just in the last two years have replaced the structure over it so the ambience of the old glass greenhouses is no longer and it had actually gotten so old that we couldn't repair it or put the money into preparing it yeah it's a new structure but it still has all the same plants in it and this greenhouse is one of the greenhouses open to the public where people can come and see the plants that we grow and we also have plants obviously that we grow for sale but in the middle benches here in the middle beds here we have a lot of our mother plants stock plants and also plants that we use for display so that our customers can actually see what what the plants look like when they mature like this monster delicioso Vergara this is and this is an interesting plan it's it's been here for probably 35 years now and it's just you can see underneath here it is just like stuck itself to the side of the wall I mean it looks like it's part of the walls yeah it's a really beautiful plant yeah and I mean the plant obviously is in stable but you can see some of this variation up here is really really beautiful and it does fruit and flower course or flower and group course we also have other mother plants of this but this one here we do harvest guardians off of it because obviously it would run all the way to the ceiling iris but yeah that's a great plan I also was admiring that Cooper you looking one yeah that's are actually a hybrid of Cooper here and that again has been in the greenhouse for at least 35 years of what if you didn't always reside here but we moved it around a bit lived in one spot for a couple decades and then they pulled it out here it's quite happy and then another one that philodendron pink princess so it's yeah she's got a couple yeah there you go really good big people it was like full tank leaves yeah yeah and you know there's always some flaking in it we don't always get that nice pink color yeah what else shall we see here in the longhouse um well there's a lot of light and here this is a full Sun greenhouse we do put a little bit of shade on it the side for the begonias but there's a rondalee shore up there which is a hanging basket now this is pretty much an ever bloomer it's a little bit waning on its flowering cycle right now the interesting thing about that is if you pick that flower and you put it in a glass of water and you get to about 11 o'clock at night all of a sudden this fragrance comes out of it really and it's it's I used to call it sandalwood yeah it's sort of saying the word but it's very very different than anything any other floors and why a glass of water do you think it comes out well no rain or no no you can I'm just saying yeah it's a cup flour I mean you can come into the greenhouses when we first screw that I don't know decades ago I remember walking to and it's not like like Susteren doctor and um you know night blooming jasmine that would like as soon as dusk comes all the big man's ears you smell it but this has to wait until it gets into a little bit in for later evening before the fragrance comes out yeah it's really a wonderful plant yeah yeah and makes a great basket like that you see these long shoots come out yeah periodically you have to shear them back to contain it this is an interesting plant that's been around for quite some time this is MIT Rio stigma axillary and it that's a fragrance to it it's actually a wonderful plant for both flowers in bloom kind of musky it has a little musky scent yeah a little bit and it's in the rubiaceae family coffee family and it never is out of blue you can see that just like the coffee plant it always said what's this flowers all like this this is actually a standard that we've grown of it but it can be grown as a potted plant it is a little bit challenging to grow and I don't exactly know why but it never made it into the trade and so as a commercial plant I know if they have trouble with it in Florida because of the heat and summer although it doesn't seem to be affected by that it came to us in the 70s from the Brooklyn Botanical Garden they were using it as a gift plant for their members and they farmed it out to some of the commercial growers in the area nobody could grow it and I got a piece of it and I've kept it all this time it's it's not fast that's the thing you know so you know you can't make time on it yeah oh is Callie under this is sermonettes this is the powder puffs always so beautiful when I see these in blooming and they're in other habitats oh yeah in the tropical areas they come and we go three or four varieties of this that's a bush behind it of a marginata which is the pink powder puff but that actually and then this is jasmine sambac yeah and this is this is the one that if you're gonna if you know if you're ever gonna grow jasmine this is the one to grow I almost could taste it in the back of my throat when I smell it no this is you know national flower of the Philippines it's sacred to the Hindu religion and its really a great container plant because it actually loves to be pruned and cheered and you get more flowers out of it but if you're ever gonna grow up jasmine in the house if you have one choice this is the one to go it's a really good tip and then there's some the other Jasmine this is the angel wing jasmine this is Jasmine Knight item which the freight yeah the fragrance isn't it's different yeah doesn't know yeah it's more to know quite the young the pow yeah yeah we have quite a few bogan vilius that we use here at logee's this is an old crimson lake vine and one of the things about this greenhouse is that these are some of the old support pipes this was originally a cut flower greenhouse so it was built and the business was mainly a cut flowers and the potted plants and collection of plants should put off on the side ventures and when my father came into the business in the 1950s he planted these vines and trees - every one of these posts all the way down so that we'd had stock material and cutting material but also that our customers could actually see the plants when I came to the greenhouses and this is something I've changed him over the years obviously I've taken some out and put it in but this is one of the original book and builders that was put in at that time you can see the buds are forming on it Norman Villiers are they can be good houseplants if you have enough sunlight for them and they tend to flower as the day it decreases and as a day increases so you can see the new buds forming and will will have quite a show here on all these tips as we go farther into the fall and there's a wall when in springtime begins we begin have you ever had any pest issues with this because when I was a moment mountain their bougainvillea was the one thing that attracted a lot of pests for them and they had it naturally growing in their greenhouse although their greenhouse didn't seem to be as regulated it was a really old greenhouse and didn't have much heating and had to go through a little bit of a cold period and they said that their Bougainville EO is the one thing that attracted everything like to get on it yeah Athens love the tips soft growth and it can get mealy bug but it's pretty resistant to the mites white flies stripped don't bother it yeah it's good a thrips of I feel like have become quite more popular in the house plant market over the last number of years the syrup is a terrible price it's probably the biggest insect issue that we have horticulture today I mean Wi-Fi pretty bad too because of the resistance and thrips are very resistant and we have a whole programs that we do to maintain low level sub Network we one thing about bugs you never eliminate them that's what I always tell people I'm like once you have I'm like don't don't ever think that you're you're going to beat the insect or the mite you're just it's all gonna be a level of maintenance I actually bring in integrated pest management into my home because they have enough plan or some bios where i could use like bio control yeah and i just feel like it's much better for me personally just because they work when you're sleeping you know essentially so but but yeah i it's it's one of those things where i felt like for six years i was blissfully unaware of house planet pests and then once you get once you get them you always have them yeah yeah it's just part of nature and the biocontrol wonder that we use quite a bit of the air logee's to eliminate pesticides and some of them work very well and but i think the issue with bio control is is always these little spaces where we don't get control from this or that right and so we still have to do some spring so this is actually one of my favorite winter blooming flowers in the greenhouse this is some fun birds you grandiflora yeah and this is this has a large blue i saw a lot of thumbr Gia's in in thailand yeah yeah yeah and there's two forms of this is this grandiflora n--'s laura folia laura folder is a little bit more purple mm-hmm flowers longer into the season but they tied this up normal these flowers change should be yeah like that yeah we go and and it's got a lot of mileage on it you can see the tips coming here or all these new growths and this will be in flower its are like we're in mid October November December January February it'd probably be out of bloom in March if if and and then the whole thing relaxes again but it's a very it's a really wonderful plant and as you can say if you go into tropical areas they have these massive lines of it I see these this was growing on the side of buildings in Singapore they planted bhurji a grandiflora all up and it wasn't in bloom when I was there but or maybe it was too far up and they you know in order to be able to see the blooms but yeah it can be a pre rent grower yeah got his feet these are in pots and we have contained this is a passive floor we I've thrown a lot of passive floors beautiful over the years I've grown a lot of passion flowers that's like a fire orange red this is per se I and it is a never bloomer for us we're in the morning here so there's probably more flowers that'll open and it's pretty NAB pretty much never a day without a bloom on it so it's a great plant for for containers for that reason and you know a lot of passion fellows are very high light loving most of them are but you can actually grow these indoors if you have a sunny window they do quite well they are vines and they are aggressive so you have to make sure you have space for that this is Clara dendron Tom Sonia variegated and that is another there's actually a green one down there we have a large mother plant of that back aways but this is sort of offseason for them so I've actually never tried to grow this indoors but I notice it a lot at Botanic Gardens yes and it's really more of a spring bloomer and what you need to do with it is put it into a dormancy so you know domme one of our older employees at work first for a number of years had one in his bedroom and he put out in the summertime and it would come into flower but when it was in his bedroom he hardly watered it and d foliated it so it became sticks yeah and it survived Wow and then after after the stick phase when you threw it outside yeah every tip is covered itself with flowers so you got to mistreat it a little bit yeah and it probably is the dry season yeah yeah this is this is a tional panthous Persei right here now this is really sort of the end of its flowering it's trying to clean off some of those flowers but this is really the end of it some of the strophanthus at the end of the flowers is coming the day length is shortening up so all summer long this was just a mass now this particular plant here is strophanthus gratis which is this leaf right here and onto it we grafted Persei which is the one we see in flower and is it because you grafted it because Persei doesn't have as good of a structure yeah we did it just so we have all three in one spot right we have another bride yeah those are this is actually a spring bloomer yeah and that's a summer and this kind of goes in between the two okay yeah so it's it's lucky because we're here in the fall and we're actually just getting just the the tail end of it yeah and this one yes I have this in my house except it's never flowered for me but it puts out so much foliage yeah this is a Petri of itrex bamboo Sitaram which is the non knock line coming out of Thailand and these are actually so it's summer blooming this is coming to the end of the cycle they flower they flower down and they keep going they keep going and it goes on for a long time and I think it's finally these tips here have exhausted themselves so the end of the season is upon us they're in hanging baskets we have two hanging baskets one here and one over here and what will happen is this so eventually exhaust itself the flowers go down and then they'll be sheared back to just around the rim of the baskets and taken out of it Wow so you do a big sheering yeah we're gonna cut them back really hard okay if they don't flower do you think you should shear them I I'd only do share them if they're getting out of control okay yeah I don't want that little Otakon and I really think that probably the flowering is a light thing yeah although and the greenhouses here where I've grown them under in the summertime that's a long side right growing them under somewhat diminished light and they still bloom so I'm wondering if there's something that I just need to trigger them because they do have a grow light on them for 12 hours a day and then they're also in my south west facing window which they love they'll grow right up like against the wind they should believe yeah I wonder if there's something else that I need to like trigger them in order to be able to starve them starve them a little bit yeah yeah reduce the feed okay sometimes when you know you have nitrogen fertilizer going yeah things it can yeah that's one way the other things like sometimes we want to be so kind to our plants but sometimes the plant needs a little bit of stress in order to be able to to bloom right water yeah and then I would probably cut them back hard after you you know get into fall yeah and then let them reflect so this is another passion flower and this is our red one yeah just probably well it's probably one of the reddest passion flowers that is in cultivation and I would say it's passiflora Miniato it's just beginning its flowering cycle now so it's a short-day bloomer from the spot it flowers on and off in the summertime but all of this becomes just a mass of flowers as we go into the winter good plant for winter time because I mean you can come be another what's that a color I you can come in here in like a buzzard in January in I think that's why I like some people are getting into like even begonias now because a lot of their foliage has a lot of color as well it doesn't always need to be in flower but like at least in winter there's a little bit of color there's another Bougainville use double red and the double bogan dealers don't drop their Brax so that's i guess you could call it not a missie plan yeah I'm really mind yeah the Brax actually have to be cut off or trimmed go on and the other thing about bougainvillea czar is in greenhouse light yeah the color is subdued so if you put that out in the Sun it would become really really red yeah that's actually to us as pink uh-huh but it's a red yeah this is our lemon tree house and this is one of the original greenhouses that my grandfather started in the true original greenhouse is that way and then in addition was put on same type of structure and here we have our Ponderosa lemon tree which is a matriarch of our greenhouse collection and this plant was brought into logee's in 1900 my grandfather brought it in and so it's you know over century old and and has been here ever since and it was brought up from Philadelphia on train and my grandfather went down I have an uncle that told me the story that he went down with a horse and wagon and picked up these plants one of them was our Ponderosa lemon and they brought it up and set it in the greenhouse here on a pot and they actually did some old photographs of it of this little tree sitting there eventually he grew up till we hit the top of the greenhouse and then they planted it and I'm not really sure the date on that but it's spent here in the ground for at least 100 years and was it was there something that attracted to him to the Ponderosa lemon to begin with was it just that it was like pretty exotic that you wouldn't even have a lemon tree in the Northeast yeah and so what is aloe what are the lodges were plant collectors yeah and I'm actually reframed plant collector as opposed to my elders I own it down a little bit because they have to have to have a brain to reforms may be reformed they would have to have everything and you can't do that because it's just not enough space if you're in a tropical area I suppose you could do that but in a greenhouse culture we have we have a limitation of what we can hold so I guess what what it during that time kind of like late 1800s Early 1900s was really when a lot of the greenhouse culture started to take shape here and a lot of collectors started to emerge it was the glass house was really in its heyday yeah yeah yeah so this is our mother lemon tree and she puts out these very large excuse me she puts out these very large lemons yeah these are actually small compared to what some have we've had them up to five pounds which is about that big yeah you mentioned that one that's a little bit more yeah there's an orange grapefruit size and actually it looks like it fell off yeah stuck up there yeah in the crotch of the tree almost reach it yeah and you can see some of them have ripened some of them are still green generally Christmas time is when most of them are ripe and how do these taste sour like a lemon they have a very thick rind on them which is kind of has a lot of oil in it and there is a difference between a table lemon and the flavor of this but it's really subtle yeah yeah so you could make you know use them for lemonade you can make lemon pies out of right you could do all kinds of things though but it is a cross between the citron the big long fruit which is really cool I don't know if you've ever seen your citron I have not seen a satyr delicious that's the rhyme you eat it's the rind that you cut it in half and there's a small amount of pulp inside and the outside rinds this big thing that's sweet it's sweet yeah and so they can actually make candy out yeah that's it run run it's between that and the table lemon so if you have the two which we do and you look at the two you oh yeah that's where they can so this is these are legal areas or food you know class of item and these are the ones that have lost their spots and this is actually the legal area that's the leopard plant but or far fewer units the leopard plant they're a funny plant in that if they get under high light in bright Sun they flag hmm even though they're you know so they're really a shade plant and so in terms of using them in bright Sun and things like that I know that they years ago they tried to bring them into flower shows where you know there was some stress from dryness and the lights and everything and you know they put them in there and then the show would start and everything was just like oh oh and they come right back up as soon as they get into a little more humidity yeah yeah so they kind of failed in that extent but they do make great house points that's interesting because I had never grown one but they you know to me when I look at it it looks like oh that seems like it could be a good bedding plant but you know what you're saying is needs a little humidity and not to of highlight yeah you know but would that makes a really good well they do we lose them in gardens but actually shade garden yeah where they have them where they put the hostas and right exactly they present happy with the next day pasture pretty large prayer plants down here yeah this is this is Cole atheism unit Sabrina which has lived here long as I've been alive it's always been here what's interesting about this is that sometimes that clay Thea Sabrina is at least that I see don't always have a purple bottom bottom yeah the honestly I've never really noticed that really but it's a beautiful clay sand um as I say it's been happy here living here for a very long time yeah there's our coffee plants we have several in the greenhouses this is coffee Arabica and yeah there's some coffee beans up there we actually there's not a lot on here because they probably picked them off but we actually use this as our mother plants so we plant the seeds to say we're actually you know make our own coffee I've done that's very laborious and it didn't taste very good you know there's there's something that people would make coffee they know what they're doing yeah I really didn't anyway it was a lot of fun yeah and they're great they're really great indoor plants I mean I'm sure many people know that they they tolerate low light they actually produce fruit when they're young they probably but when they get up to about 3 3 feet or so once they stop the branch they'll flower for you and produce fruit and and you know they'll tolerate indoor conditions and and the flowers are fragrant and when you're when they're in bloom you know it's really quite a quite a time the gardenias this is the the porcini ana vgi which is our common never tried doing a gardenia indoors but I well they do have issues and I think that I heat there's a lot of complaints that you'll buy him like this see the buds on them and you bring it home and they fall yeah they just don't bloom yes and I think it's a temperature differential yeah yeah problem so if you had a place where he got cold and warm during the daytime that would probably stop you know they're famous yep and so these are our begonias these are the bench where we whole plants that we sell nice so we have them different varieties looks like they really need to restock the bench a little thin right now yeah low jeez is known for its begonias um I've taken my shine to them also over the years but it was an uncle that actually did quite a bit of hybridizing in the 1930s 1920s said you know the begonia societies are beginning and so he was a founding member and all this other stuff and then my parents actually they met at a begonia Society anything so it's sort of been like you know part of the family yeah and you know we still grow them they've kind of waned a bit in years in recent years in popularity but I do believe that that will change it's a cyclic thing yeah I'm begonias are great plants they're really wonderful indoor plants in that they tolerate very dry conditions with these many do I mean we're going is a huge family so you get stuff that needs to be in Terraria they tolerate lower light so some of them actually prefer lower like mm-hmm and you know the fact that they can take the dryness you can go away and let them dry out and you know they come back and you're still alive and do quite well well we'll have to do a tour in like your begonia house as well and you'll have to show us some of your favorite yeah this is a wonderful volume out in flower right now this is stronger loading buying turquoise flower yeah we have a picture of it here and we've seen some Botanic Gardens it's just so exquisite yeah it's one crazy-looking color I mean to find that in nature it's very avatar ask very and also to be blue like a blue like a kind of true blue flower like yeah yeah it's got that green yeah they're very big heavy vines as you can see it looks like it needs like sometimes though to get established you know it takes a little you need to get up you need to get them about as big as this here that they're in terms of the stem before they'll begin to bloom yeah and I have flowered them in containers but really they're a plant that needs to go into the ground mm-hmm people do grow them in their homes and stuff but I take a long time to get a vine big enough right and the flowering mechanism on them is kind of odd because some years this flower is very heavy in other years so we hardly get any blooms out of it and I don't actually know why I mean our temperature is always the same a light here is always the same we do prune have varying degrees of pruning on it and if we did not prune this this whole greenhouse would be just one big strong golden I'm you sad bad it's say just once they get going they just kinda feel like it's a little bit like a wisteria okay very much and then wisteria also likes to be mistreated and cut back and like crazy and can actually take your house down yeah how do you take em cuttings of this I just as soon you do it out of the Whittier ones oh yeah this is actually the perfect cutting right here where you've got green stem yes and firm leaves yep you don't want the growth to be too soft but if you go into woody stuff it does not could you graft could you grab something on what is suffering I'm sure you could they root if you catch of them right yeah we there's a period during the summer time when they root really well you can route them just like nothing you probably get ninety percent this time of year if we took cuttings we would be losing a lot of them right if we do it in the winter time even though the wood looks good yeah the leaves look good they don't root at all so it's kind of a timing thing and we also have to give them very high humidity so they're a plant when they go into our mist system we literally cover them with paper for a number of days just to get them to stabilize and the flowers actually can come out of old wood or they'll come off of new wood happens usually in April and and they you know I'm a place sometimes a fast it's like you're walking down in one day and there's nothing there in the next day all of a sudden there's these big things just draping out and you said how did that happen when they grew overnight yeah and here we have a noni fruit um this is actually the top of the plant way up in there so the top of the point somewhere up in the top there but this is the fruit and would you mention is really gross this is probably one of the worst tasting fruits I've ever eaten and and that's my palate there are areas of the world where they eat this it's also known as famine food okay because at the end of the day when you have nothing else to eat you'll start eating this it's very or you'd rather family just to use some harsh words it's kind of like vomit and bleu cheese and it smells awful and it's throughout Polynesia the Hawaiian Islands however they would normally prepare it do you know um there's actually a fermentation with a they're actually growing it commercially there's a process where they take the pulp and go through and juice out of it and they go through fermentation okay and that actually takes a lot of the nasty flavors and there's some medicinal natural medicinal healing properties to it so there is a industry based on that and I what's being done in Hawaii got it but it's an interesting looking fruit it gives weight pinecone yeah and there's a young one coming on yeah and the flowers actually well we're not at a point where we can see the flowers that the flowers are just they come out on little bumps like that and the thing just keeps growing until it turns into this big round oblong thing yeah there's our Jasmine Rex mm-hmm which has no fragrance no fragrance and that is awful because what a beautiful yeah yeah and it's just coming into bloom you see all these buds that are on the top here yeah it's just filled of them and it will be almost covered with white by the time we're done is this something that had been cultivated or is it like is this a the actual size of the flower as a species that's the size that flowers of species yeah yeah it's really a showy one yeah I remember my mother telling me that it shaded off the big the big flower for the scent I guess yeah my mother actually said that she had run into a fragrant one but interesting yeah I've never said I've never seen it we often look for you know there's a interesting flower that's um this is xsara odorata which is pregnant mmm Oh darada so Dorado yeah promises promises to be odorous yep and it's a nice little long tubular what actually pollinates that my guess would be probably moths okay yeah yeah yeah and you know there's the flower head on it and flowers first all summer long it's coming oh there's still some young buds up in the top there this is an interesting vine this is called uh mmm yeah climbing plumeria oh this is Jenner more flower that smells like a thang kinda Nance's which circus peanuts circus peanuts do you remember those like little marshmallow yeah actually it has a smell of some type of candy that's what I'm saying it's like the circus peanut candy that is like or it's kind of this orange color I know I think I'm the only kid who probably ate those interesting yeah but this is the fragrant form of climbing plumeria and there's many in the trade of the you know white flowers okay when I think about I think about trees you know like yeah yeah so it's not it's actually it's in the pasta and AC family say miss bloom area actually but it's quite rare and the propagation on it is somewhat temperamental I think that's part of the issue and it is also deciduous so it starts to well it's kind of late like January or just start dropping its leaves and then when you get into like June it's just starting to grow out which is kind of tough but I really I really like the plan is for its fragrance your begonia up there is pretty big I this is a basket this is a very old cultivar called Elaine and it's an angel wing variety and it's extremely vigorous we've had it for many years makers you see it makes a great task it also makes a good potted plant and flowers quite freely it blooms on it you see a lot of buds coming on that right now it looks like it's going through one flowering cycle do you have to ever cut it back yeah yeah you prune them really hard yeah yeah but looks like it probably needs it but then what are you gonna do you got all those blooms coming exactly you let it go yeah here we have our air layering we do a little bit of that yeah oh geez so this is where the the root would come well yeah but the root is actually what we do is we girdle it mm-hmm we girlie inside of it and then we put rooting hormone on it then they put Spagna Moss wrap it and now they've left that so that the water as the water has come through they can um feed water into it keep it wet so that girdle plant has got only one choice either send out a callous and rude or die and it does propagate quite easily it some seed falling off it does probably get quite easily from layer like that you can read it from cutting but it's a very very long process if you took a cutting off if you took a big cutting like that it yeah we wouldn't survive yeah you'd have to take something smaller and it's many many many probably a couple years before it's even saleable so how long would usually typically have this the sphagnum and the tinfoil around this farm it probably is probably be on there for six months or so okay before they take it off and then they peel this back and I don't think we can see it you'd see these you see weeks actually coming into that and then you'd take it take it off cut it off but the flowers on it it was really we're out of this moving cycle right now we've see that we have a lot of seeds yeah it puts out these hooks see the hooks oh yeah enos on those hooks that the flowers spawn and they'll remain there and rebloom rebooting rebooting the year after year until they become this big woody gnarly thing that keeps putting flowers out and what do you do with the seeds do you ever like try to we do this from see where you can grow out from seed the thing is is for our customers who are emotionally growing in containers we try to do as much as we can to get you the flowers early so if I give you a seedling of that it could be many many many many many years before your flower this right here if I if you buy that as a propagation it'll be right it's already got its flowers on it yeah he's got those little hooks and those will come right into bloom and the flowers are you know long pebbled it's in the UH Nanae see family you know it's the family of cherimoya and ylang-ylang Kananga and and they have this wonderful fruit you smell it in the evening so sometimes a greenhouse gonna come through in the evening you can just see walking down the I go whoa I can smell it you know and you can find your way to the bloom generally in the summertime well there's oh yeah there it is yeah oh sorry Mac oh because your little bit of smell oh wow that is just like and punchy yeah and yeah it's pretty yeah and the fact is it's like this kind of green yellow flower it's just so unique yeah yeah and kind of you know doesn't really look like much of a boy to you is a nighttime this one so far this smells like um you've tasted gooseberries before when you would taste it smells like a gooseberry th yeah yeah Wow and so how has just out of curiosity before we we end this tour how has logee's evolved over the last hundred years or so really well we started out with my grandfather as the local florist in the small green house at the end here and he would do like you know weddings funerals he would do you know holidays there actually back in the I found some old Diaries of his so you know you kind of see what was going on you know they actually had Memorial Day and all those kind of things and he you know he had this thing about plants collecting plants and so that floral business is what supported him and went through the depression that's what they did during the Depression they sold yeah they sold bouquets and things like that but the collection of plants like in you know 1900 he bought a Ponderosa lemon which had nothing to do with the floral business and so that just accumulated and it was in the 1930s that my mother and she was a young woman then had started amassing a collection of herbs because she was an herbalist and geraniums pelagonians and they had so many of these plants in there in a town with like you know three thousand people or two thousand people and no and nobody really was caring about these what would they deal with them so they published the list and put it into periodicals and then the sent the list out and that began but ninety early 1930s began the mail-order business and so now we had a market small as it was for all these crazy things that logee's was growing that my elders were growing and you know they just kept collecting plants and collecting plants and then as I mentioned before my uncle saw hybridizing begonias and and you know the business started to grow sort of bond its own right there's people kept buying them and then there's the florist business kept shrinking which is a good thing because I really got into floral business and and when I came here this you know the collection was already here I was blessed yeah and I've taken it in somewhat different directions you know I've done a lot with fruiting plants because we already you know we had some but I brought a bigger collection of that up and I really as a flower child of the 60s and 70s you know I fell in love with flowers and and so I started collecting flowers so I really went into and you know I had a greenhouse to grow them in so not everything can be grown in the home you know my real horticultural experiences in greenhouse culture yeah and and I've never stopped and I'm still doing yeah go until I can't do it anymore yeah and so you also have both outdoor and indoor plants that you you sell you specialize in a lot of fruiting and flowers as you mentioned but have you seen a little bit more of a trend towards foliage plants and in tremendous and we also had this happen during the 70's and and probably 1972 73 74 that period of time there was this tremendous interest in indoor plants in container plants and that those were sort of the alternative hippie back to land movement that came along and then morphed into that and and then that actually waned and and went into other things so we're back there again yeah question is you know have you some of those plants that you had on stock like back in the day maybe you could start to actually put them in publication we're doing it again yeah oh yeah lots of things yeah yeah to benefit to keeping it on the bench I guess yeah so you know the very gates in Agana yeah I've had that forever yeah and sometimes it lived under the bend by the way the under the bench plants are quite nice yeah we use a lot of these some that's just the standard answer but yeah if if you don't do that you have to weed yeah so we actually use and this is contrary to contemporary vertical gene you want you place weed free and the optimum dia benches permaculture you allow things to grow we do yeah yeah we were waiting for awhile and we said like why fight it and I actually regret a little bit about putting that vigorous Tradescantia should have been one of the small release because we do have to trim it out of the walk yeah yeah so there is a cycle that's come back and and foliage is actually back in there's a lot of interest in it and I'm you know I have a Georgian anthis do you know that's judging I've had that forever and all of a sudden you know I'm digging my little Gian ant this planet now and going okay we got to go now yeah it's time to do it ready for Showtime yeah well thank you so much this is just a wonderful tour and I can't wait to actually see some of the other greenhouses that you have here oh I need to show you one more flower okay so this is actually this is a very vigorous mine almost invasive but in a pot it's very contained it's a Phase II olace which is in the edible string beans and things like that and yet it's used for flowers there's two forms of this there's big no which is a fragrant corkscrew has a very similar flower structure to it I see it has a little curly yah and then there's this Phase II olace which actually only puts out two flowers rather than a spike and there's no fragrance to it but when pollination happens on this the large bee comes down lands on the petals oh yeah look at that that's so cool then the pistol and stamen come out yeah and then when he flies off in pollinates the flower that is such an interesting structure does it have to be a pretty large be like a I would imagine beyond through pretty and it's never out of the interesting thing it's never out of blue this plant is has always has a flower on it summertime it's more so it's in this small yeah eight inch pot Wow and and they trim it back just a little bit but everything's so tight in there and it's you know it needs so much water and in the so limited food that that and that's again that's that limited that's dress yeah I'm stress on it that it stays in bloom pretty much all year I love how you like it's probably partially you let you pruned it but it has this nice conical shape to it and that's really just wrap it around yeah yeah awesome thank you so much for showing me that it's so cool what are some of your favorite plants that byron showed us today tell me your thoughts in the comments below and I love your help growing this channel so if you're keen to help check out how you can be a sustaining member of the channel for the price of a monthly cup of coffee and if you're acquiring more plants than a commercial greenhouse then you may want some help organizing their care I've put together at the house plant care spreadsheets and co-created a house plant care tracker to keep your plants watering and fertilizing schedules on track check out how you can access it in the description below

Channel: Summer Rayne Oakes

Views: 226,112

Rating: 4.9330721 out of 5

Keywords: Summer Rayne Oakes, Homestead Brooklyn, Plant One On Me, plants, houseplants, indoor plants, garden, gardening, house plants, houseplant care, 365 Days of Plants, 1 Plant a Day, One Plant a Day

Id: i-ofwkzR0bw

Length: 43min 35sec (2615 seconds)

Published: Sun May 24 2020