Silver Krome Greenhouse Tour: Aroids, Prayer Plants, and More! — Ep 166

so I just got here in Homestead Florida at silver chrome Gardens it's basically the commercial operation of Bill for delante and we are going to see a little bit of what he's growing and I heard he has a really kick-ass private collection which maybe we'll get to see first you want to go see his commercial operation [Music] Hey hello welcome to silver chrome Gardens now that's boomer this is Daisy and this is Meghan I'm assuming these are the guard dogs they're my protectors nice to meet you guys well I'd love to see your collection here if you give us a little bit of a tour problem bill has six greenhouses and though he grows a range of plants he's mostly known for his a roids like an thorium's philodendron and Alocasia as well as harder to find plants in the marin TCE or a per plant family likes Tremonti jo Portilla and kallithea bill took over the greenhouses two years ago from his father we started the business back in 1983 he still comes to work every day so he can sit in the office and pay bills but that's about all he does so I'm in charge of going out in the nursery and fixing everything growing everything making sure everything is perfect and what did your dad grow in the beginning was it also a roids or what what did he start with in the 80s when he started he was growing lots of spaz he was doing singhania mostly bred and brother material yeah but then he started specializing and more of the unusual because it's really hard in the industry to do everything everyone else is doing because they always undercut you on price right the thing is to do something that no one else is doing and once you start doing that you got a name for yourself then things start rolling from there so how has it worked for you since you specialized in a lot of a roid so you when I think of you I think of like an thorium's I think of a Lakeisha how has it changed now that there's been a little bit more of an a roid craze well Instagram has hit us like a big pile of bricks and has made things a lot different than it was before yeah and right now end-user is clamoring for things we're before the garden centers would decide what the end user wanted and they that's what they supply right now with Instagram everybody knows what they want in advance and they're ordering it specifically for that reason not walking into a garden center oh that's pretty this is pretty they're seeing it on their friends feed they're seeing it somewhere else they're seeing it on YouTube and they're deciding hey this is what I need I need to find someone who has it which has made the Internet companies that sell on the internet so much more profitable right so and you're really a b2b a business-to-business right so you are growing out your plants here and you're selling them to other businesses like garden centers florist shops and Taylor escapers landscapers we have one customer - sells on Amazon and so I guess my question then is if you see the you know influx of the end user clambering for interesting plants are your nurseries and/or your buyers coming back to you saying like well what else do you have or can I get something even more unique than what you have yes they're always trying to do that that's why we're always trying to freshen our lineup add new things something's not selling we take it away add something else trying to get to that sweet spot where we know it's going to sell all the time awesome well maybe as we start to look around the area you could point out some of those new things that you think people are asking for okay so this is a really colorful part of your nursery yes Cal Theo's have become very very popular because of their beautiful colors and the fact that they're easy to grow in some circumstances if you have the right environment what is the right environment because I know it's something that like people come into a garden center or nursery they fall in love with them because as you said the colorful their colorful they have beautiful markings but people get them in their house and then they feel challenged they don't like fluoride they don't like chlorine they like don't like bromine city water is a no-no yeah so if you can use well water if you can use reclaim rainwater if you can use I have people collecting water from their air conditioning units and using it on them if you can keep all those chemicals and high salts out of the water they do great as long as you have a good amount of humidity you can't dry them out as far as you put them in an office building no humidity whatsoever you're gonna see some burned edges on them so how do you treat them differently in this greenhouse versus if you are growing them elsewhere is this a different treatment altogether or well we have well water we don't use any city water so that we don't have to worry about the chemicals and our water the one thing you do have to worry about is we this house is on a predator system for spider mites so we use predatory mites to kill all the spider mites and that's the one thing we do differently on them because we don't like to spray with harsh chemicals so we'd rather use Mother Nature's Way of getting rid of the pests so use biological insects or not insects but biological controls using predatory mites what is do you know the specific predatory mite that you use because I know there's different ones okay we have used personalists in the past because sometimes the temperature and the humidity levels will even increase or decrease their effectiveness the California kiss lasts a little bit longer persimmon lists are a little bit more voracious so if you have to knock something down right away persimmon is as good but if this house we resupply every three weeks so that's fine because they keep everything dead in here for three weeks at a time so then let's let's go through some of these because I'd like to not like overlook them and of course you have something that's not moranto Zork Althea's here this is a jungle cactus isn't it yes that's the hooker I beautiful white flowers when they do bloom and these are called Queen of the Night cacti right yes yeah the big flowers at nighttime right so you have to be out here at night in order to be able to see them flower or early in the morning when you keep you come they're still a little open and then you have some calathea Sabrina's here that one has a royal the flower gets its royal blue like a purplish royal blue color is it does it come off on a stock no it's at the base of the plant okay so that's one of the more pretty colors okay so it's like I don't see the this one but the roof of Barbra Barbra okay similar then it gets it at the base I always love the the texture of these two they don't have the colorful bottoms but they have a really beautiful texture and obviously that flower I have never seen them in bloom yeah it needs to be a good size to start blooming okay and then you have these which caliph EOS and Rihanna or nada yes is it a variation of sand Rihanna or not I don't even know how it is now but I think there's a couple variations on sand Rihanna now these are just still pretty small so are you you're growing these out I'm assuming when would these actually be ready for sale when they get to be a bigger size over here I think I have some that would be right around the size this one's actually tagged to go out this week bill says that it takes him around six months to get the jaipur tias and calathea x' to a shippable size from the quarter size liners he orders and some of the anthurium that he grows can actually take nine months to a year before they reach a saleable size bill has a variety of other monta see that he grows ranging from new types of jabber Tiye to some of the more coveted species not always easily found on the market additionally they also have their very own patented prayer plant stroma thei stroma toy tease and variation charlie which has variegated yellow markings on the leaves I feel like these have less green in them yes like that one has a little bit more green over there but these are very when you're splitting it you Cajun illegit one that will revert back to its species form which is plain green and the great thing about this is has a beautiful orange flower in the early spring oh that's nice mine's number flowered yet but I have big it gets big leaves yeah yeah for us it's January until about April okay Oh flower okay it likes the cooler temperatures to start flowering so should you give it like a cooler temperature at night or just like cooler temperature during like a nighttime temperatures usually what causes flowers okay well let's go see some more of your of your facilities [Music] this house has some Samantha reham in it and most of these come a long way through silver chrome Gardens gets most of their anthurium varieties from Anthea and Holland a highly automated facility specializing in both anthuriums and orchids which was the subject of earlier episodes on plant one on me and it was so fascinating to see the automation which is like a little bit different from here because this is a is much more hands-on you know it's less you have like I mean fertigation systems and things like that but very different from that neck of the woods it is because labor is a lot cheaper in this country that's over there how do you decide which ones that you'd like to grow out here we rely on our suppliers to give us idea of what will work in our temperatures down here we have very hot summers and we don't get very much nighttime cold temperature which is what and 3m is really love they like humidity but they like it cooler than we can supply down here so we really need specific varieties that will do well down here for us right and you were telling me before that they are typically found in a little bit more like cloud forest locations yes the original species in South America are from cloud forest areas and the jungles where they're higher up in elevation they have nighttime temperatures that cool down in daytime you have lots of cloud cover from the the mist the humidity which is basically like a constant cloud cover over there and with that you get prettier flowers prettier foliage all the things that you normally see on an thorium's in the summer time down here they lose about two shades of color on the flower the leaves sort of drop a little bit color too though we really have to push the varieties that's do well in heat and how long does it actually take you to test a specific variety here is it like a season or so or well basically we get about 250 plants from the lab we take them out we have to make sure that we get them a turn time of year so we actually have them during our summer we want to know how they're going to do with the worst time of year not the best yeah because if you grow something during the best and it looks great and then you order it and you don't realize that hey in the winter time it's great but the summer time it's not so much right so we grow them out from there we see how they do during our summer if they do great then we reorder for the next year okay so it takes a long time to figure out what we got to do how we're going to which varieties were gonna take which rice we're gonna skip yeah and so I think I really love putting this into perspective for a lot of people especially for those of us who actually like to grow plants indoors because if we rewind back and we go to an thourough again they were sharing with us that sometimes it takes up to 10 years to actually find the perfect quality orchid or anthurium because that's what they grow out and that's mind boggling to me because they're like hand selecting and kind of selecting like the best ones maybe it's for the best color or the best foliage or maybe it keeps its braixen and fluorescents a lot longer who knows what they're selecting for but it takes almost a decade or can take a decade then you are testing them out in your climate which may be for you know six months nine months whatever it is and then you actually have to grow out the liners or the small plugs so they're small plants in order to be able to get them to a size for sale which could take it's basically from when they come in from anther it takes about nine months to a year to finish in anthurium properly so I think that gives I think somebody like me or somebody who is buying houseplants that much more of an appreciation because that is so much of what we don't see before we actually go to a garden center and pick up a plant yeah also we do our own breeding work here so we totally commiserate with what they have to do it takes years and years and years to get in hybrid that you like and they did want to put in the tissue culture which is the same thing they go through yeah Wow fascinating so much more appreciation I kind of bow down to you and then is this prince of orange er which one is that that's Macaulay's finale okay Princeton she does not like us so it's hard to grow is it just because of the heat or you're not quite sure you camp but doesn't like our greenhouses it gets lots of bacterial rot on the on the leaves where the McCauley's finale and the moonlight don't have the same problem so that principal orange does and then this is the moonlight right yeah that's our number one selling plant is it really yeah we'd sell a lot to casinos large mass plantings and big malls and places like that because it grows extremely well in low low light situation interesting and it has this kind of like brightness to it's almost like a neon green with the new the new foliage yeah really brightens up a dark area when you're using it right and I guess like low light but brightens it up with the with the foliage it's like a perfect combination Daisy got her pot to play with she fixed one every day this feels he likes to tear up and she'll run around like it's her precious oh my goodness now this is interesting if we could just stop here so this is what you know some of the liners would look like right or the little plugs yeah this we get in from the lab and this is what they look like and then we'll put depending on the plant between one and three plants in a pot a six inch pot and we'll grow them out from there and then those are your six inch pots right there yes those are about to be planted okay and then from here that would probably take you said somewhere between moonlight is a little bit faster than an anthurium so that is about six months finish it okay it's neat to see it in progress so are these ones that you already have orders for or that you know you're gonna have orders for or the moonlight it's very popular with interior scapers so we have lots of pre-orders for that one Macaulay's finale is more of a I need one box here one box there one box here so it's small orders but lots of them now that I had a sense as to how long it actually takes bill to grow out certain varieties of plants I asked him how he can predict what growers and consumers will actually want our biggest problem is it's a lot of guessing you always guess of what the consumer is gonna want because you have no idea what's going to be popular a year from now and that's what you're basically doing all the growers doing is speculating on what he thinks they'll be able to sell in a year right some nurseries have quick turnaround some products in and out in and out in and out and they are able to say hey I'm selling more of this I can plant more of this where we will grow a little bit slower growing plants like air-raids mostly are pretty slow so for me to turn around and say I need to print more of this it takes me a year to get it up into production right and sometimes trends move faster than that yes Trane's move way faster then we can possibly move in I don't think people understand that yeah they think oh that's popular you should be growing more of it yeah I will be growing more of it but that'll be available in a year yeah right on I think I'm doing videos such as these I mean really helped because people begin to you don't you don't appreciate what you don't know and and I think that that's one of the things that we're finding out is you know - in order to be able to get that plant to a level to make it available all over the United States are all over the world that it takes a number of you guys in order to be able to start producing them and a undisclosed amount of time depending on the the plant and in the case of erodes as you were mentioning there a little bit of a slower grower it's not as maybe as quick as like say a peperomia yes is this something that you could share that's a really popular plant right now those liners are coming out at Chinese laboratory yeah I had to get those in on a whim yeah because they have a minimum order size to bring them over for China okay it's a little bit more expensive to bring something in from Asia and you have to see and you're not even quite sure whether they're gonna grow well here I was pretty sure I can girl yeah my issue was would I be able to sell them for what the price that I have to get in order to be able to make it worth while right because here I can't markup stuff like a garden center can mark it up because my customers still have to resell it right exactly do they just start to develop in the juvenile form Birkin is a plain green leaf interesting it doesn't actually get the white until it gets to be a more adult size leave it's fascinating I mean I shouldn't be that fascinated by it because I know that's true and sometimes there's plants that start with the off stripes yeah and then they go playing game because the calathea sand Arianna or not or not maybe six seven feet tall it's three it's playing green yeah this is playing green paddle leaf like the same thing with Circe Estes Morales I think it starts out as like a really you know kind of beautiful white striations on it and then all of a sudden that goes yes green well this is a this is a really hot one right now I start to see it come out here and there on the internet and people are paying primo dollars for it so hats off to you for jumping in on that one okay she's here mm-hmm and your aunt the Rams which in allocations we usually grow in a six inch pot but if we have something left over we'll put it into a 10 inch pot is this technically Alocasia poly that's one of ours yes we patented that one many many many years ago it was selected out of a regular group of amazonica yeah because it was shorter squatter we thought it was a better plant and so were able to get something that actually was for a while the number one most popular plant and interior escapers in the world well I have a question for you because when I bring my Amazon ACCA's and/or Polly's I battle with spider mites and that's in the Northeast so I don't know how if people battle with the same situation in different necks of the woods but do you have any kind of feedback on it spider mites the number one thing in the entire world that attracts them is stress if you stress your plan out it's gonna get spider mites exudes all sorts of pheromones it says help me help me help me kill me and then spider mites know that that smell is and they go right to it right so if you change the environment your plants in you like bring it from outside to inside you do something them like that then you're always going to get some sort of stress reaction to it once that stress reaction is you get spider mites you get all sorts of problems from there so the best thing to do is try not to stress your plan huh and it's easier done if you have like a greenhouse like this this but if it comes to it you just gonna have to use manufacturers recommended sprays oils different things is there a way to acclimatize the plant from coming in like bathing and optimum conditions like a greenhouse like this and then transitioning it into your home environment in a way that is more acceptable sitting it next to a humidifier I mean is there on the allocations it's gonna be a big shock coming from 85 90 degrees summer temperatures down here into a New York City apartment do you think do you think it's better to get them in the january/february months when it's a little cooler here or it's does that not make a difference most allocations basically stop growing in the wintertime they either go dormant or they just stop new leaf production so he's sort of freezing them in time so if you were able to buy them in the winter time and keep them alive in the transport truck and on the loading dock of that facility yes you probably will get them in suspended animation in the winter time but in again in the spring time when they start popping again you'll get them to be grow out strong because they'll have all that winter stored up energy very good to know Wow so you're growing out some glory Oh sums philandering gloriosa some more anthurium more anthuriums from holland and some some laboratories in the US as well we grow more varieties of anthurium than probably anyone in the United States Oh what is this one that's an thorium rainbow champion for men Thoreau okay yeah because I I just got this one oh I don't even know like seven or eight months ago and I fell in love with it because the Brax are so big and one was like flopping over like my chickens comb and I just I fell in love with it and the leaves are also really nice too this is a summertime bloom mm-hmm this is a wintertime bloom we're already starting to get the wintertime night temperatures yeah so it's actually changing the color of the blue Wow and it looks actually much more closer to the to the this is the plan I'm really trying to get chlorophyll in its flower Wow cuz it notices that the days are getting shorter so this is basically anthurium on top of anthurium on top event there I am yeah we do a few skin dances on the aisle oh yes of course and then I saw some fill it under and branti a nose right here too right and some soda Roy oh nice those are popular yes that actually went for a pretty penny into your ride show yeah that's when I give them and then this obviously stands out haha if they're in big bill that was my first hybrid I ever made and they're both big bills yes I kept two for breeding purposes because you always want to make sure you have pollen when you have a fertile flower so you have an incredible collection here which we're not gonna get to see in this episode but hopefully after we go through your commercial operation you'll take us to of course your your private collection which this will give you a little bit of a tease of what's that what's to come in the private collection well this one's like a candy stripe color as an authority called Safari that's an older variety but they have newer varieties that have the stripes as well they have not released into the u.s. yet okay they have release in Holland did it do well for you here when you were growing it out before the older variety it's more of a cut flower variety rather than a pot plant variety so we grew it as a cut flower they were pretty popular yeah when we did grow it but now they have an actual pot variety I don't remember the name at this time since they won't allow me to grow it okay I'm hoping fingers crossed so these have some more of your enter amps here yes this is an area where we keep a lot of our bird nests and theorems this variety is big red bird it's one of our tissue cultured hybrids that we made in the shade it'll have a red vein but in the full Sun or well partial Sun it'll have a whole leaf will be red and do you have any tips for people who are growing birds nests and 30ms in their their home because that is something that I think I know you're known for they're almost indestructible it's actually a really great plant for inside your house yeah I had one of my doctors and I put a bird nest ruffles in his office and it was there for about 15 years and he never did anything to it and looked the beautiful as the day I put it in for 15 years he didn't really grow much but he didn't really have any lights in the area as doctors offices no windows yeah so it it survived it just you know it looked great do people put them in their landscape out here or yes you can do that down here you can have them in your landscape okay but for those of us up north we have to you have to describe to the houseplants yes below 32 degrees you're probably gonna get some leaf drop if it freezes you're you're gonna kill it yeah well a lot of them birds nests and thorium's have like really meaty roots oh yeah so what's the what's the best way for caring for your plant indoors yes you can see here someone's like an orcid yes yeah you can either put them in a basket and have them hanging you can put them in a big clay pot if they're worried that the hydraulic pressure of the roots will actually bust out clay pots so a lot of people use concrete pastas a little bit more sturdy plastic they'll bust out of eventually push out and to crack the plastic down the seam of it yeah I've actually seen them in garden centers and plant shops pushing out of their plastic it'll start to bubble you know look like The Incredible Hulk about the busts out of his shirt I usually have to cut them out of the pot so you know when they're when they're in that situation the best thing to do is just is take it and just smack it on your knee and it goes once it has all that pressure in it yeah that's fantastic I mean just to know that that the amount of pressure happens actually in the rise if rhizosphere in the root zone that's gonna be that's like tremendous you know your plant is literally after about I'd say about two years in this size pot there won't be any so left the plant will have cannibalize all the soil and you'll only find roots in there so are you advocating for planting in a like a much larger pot or is it just the next size up or you know cuz you're what I'm getting is that these roots actually grow you know fairly fast and are very strong oh yeah they're very strong you can keep them under planted and they'll do fine if you put them in a really big pot they'll love the new root zone but basically what they do is they go out to the edges of it and then go down and under okay so they want to find the outer limits of their ability because a lot of these in the wild are grown in inside of trees you know wherever the birds drop the seeds that's where they're grown so you'll see a lot of them growing off the side of something like this so that's what they really want to do they want to attach on to the side of a tree attached on to a rock and when you ever go to South America and see where they're actually growing in their environment on the side of logs stuff like that and I have a question because when you're saying like similar to orchids and you know a lot of orchids actually want to grip on to rocks or terra-cotta and there's some folks who have this you know should I grow them in a terracotta pot or not because terracotta has like more of a wicking ability sometimes the calcium deposits will build up could they potentially hurt the roots in any kind of way where maybe there's calcium buildup or anything along that lines no these things are super strong you won't you won't have a problem with that okay perfect I had one customer who had a bought a bunch for a landscape in Key West and they had hurricane there and they were under seven days straight of sea water in the yard and when the sea la sea water receded the only thing left were the in theory um's a lot of the natives died but the in theory um's were perfectly fine being under sea water for seven days okay so for anybody who wants a really indestructible house plant and when I have ever said Daniel Cole Kissimmee folia big red bird hybrid might actually be up there most of them most of the bird nest varieties are extremely Hardy I have some landscape allocations that you'll be amazed with their size Borneo giant is huge you'll get about 14 feet tall oh my goodness haha so you imagine they're probably up to the roof when they get that and they're growing in such small pots they like to be under potted alle cases like good humidity but they don't like a whole lot of water so they like so impressive that their their pot is so tiny my favorite allocation is the lutea with the yellow I love the yellow leaves they're so beautiful it reminds me of a Swiss chard anyway uh-huh yeah exactly same color yeah we also do some xanthus oma we have the lime zinger and the violaceum and those do really well on the landscape down here and again this has like that really beautiful shock of neon green color so it looks like it would probably pop out out of the landscape environment this is one of the hybrids the released by Agra starch was another of our labs yeah called sumo it has that giant purple leaf nice good coloration on it yeah beautiful reminds me of kind of like more decorative kale we have like a lot of edible landscape plants that end up becoming more landscape than edibles in the Northeast is the allocation of black stem which has the beautiful black petioles look at the leaf coming right up out of there it has real good contrast on the back of the leaf and this is for you know creating really really dramatic landscapes cuz you can't go wrong with these and if they this doesn't get up to 14 feet tall though okay so really you're doing a lot of houseplants but you also do a lot of landscape plants especially for the Florida market for instance yeah an allocation down here they're great for landscaping they use them plantings in different outdoor restaurants and containers containers beautiful well no this is amazing to see your operation and you know I've seen you in the shows but it's so neat to actually see your operation getting here and what you're growing next which is super cool and I cannot wait to go see your private collection what information from Bill surprised you about running a commercial plant operation United States tell me in the comments below if you're digging the episodes on this channel then tap on the subscribe and notifications button so you can support the channel and get new episodes delivered to your inbox daily and if you'd like to explore the softer skills of plant care and our connections to them then check out how to make a plant love you which has released in both English and Dutch with more translations on the way finally if you'd like to gain more tactical skills to house plant care and maintenance then check out the house plant masterclass at house plant masterclass calm [Music] you

Channel: Summer Rayne Oakes

Views: 162,424

Keywords: Summer Rayne Oakes, Homestead Brooklyn, Plant One On Me, plants, houseplants, indoor plants, garden, gardening, house plants, houseplant care, Silver Khrome Gardens, Silver Khrome Greenhouse Tour, Homestead Florida Nursery Tour, greenhouse tour, Houseplant tour, glasshouse tour, Anthurium, Anthurium Care, Calathea, Calathea care, Goeppertia, Greenhouse plant tour, Florida greenhouse tour, houseplants for the home

Id: 0dfSuo_v7fk

Length: 34min 6sec (2046 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020