After a long winter and an unusually cold and dry spring, summer has finally come to Sweden! But there were times this spring when it felt like summer would never come. You can see scars from the drought and cold all over as many plants and flowers outside did not make it. Alas, one who waits for something good… Summer is here, we have about 18 hours of daylight now and the weather has been quite agreeable for several weeks. So, we decided to move out to the seaside cottage early this year and commute to work for a while. This weekend the first load of orchids made the journey out. Over the next few weeks I will shuttle the rest of them out as well.
I usually bring a few selected orchids out with me for the summer (see 2012), but I still have to shuttle back and forth to the city every four days to water the rest. I always feel like I am missing a lot, and the longer we stay the more out of touch I feel with the orchids left in the city, especially the pleurothallids. But this year, that is all about to change… Right now I am in the process of building a fantastic greenhouse, so from now on I will be able to bring all my orchids out to the coast, and extend the season from (hopefully) early May through September. A very exciting prospect! I will share more on this as the project comes to completion in the next month or so. For the time being I just keep the orchids in a temporary location where they are sheltered from the wind next to the house.
Hello Karma-
I enjoy your blog immensely- the photographs are beautiful and the technical information is invaluable. I live in an apartment, i.e. I am an indoor grower. Your blog has inspired me to build an orchidarium of my own to maximize certain culture aspects.I’m almost done with my build, and I have a few questions you might be able to help me with. My space is about 4’x3’x 4′ (sorry, 1.2m x .9m x 1.2m) and I was wondering how much ventilation with the “outside world” the orchidarium might need to keep the air inside fresh – allowing enough gas exchange to insure healthy plant respiration. I’ve installed some scythe fans so air movement should be good, but the idea of stale air is still unnerving to me. Secondly, I have a rather thick glass top to keep the heat off my plants and allow for higher humidity. I wanted this feature so I can put my plants as close to the lamps as possible to maximize the light intensity (I love mini cattleyas!). I believe glass filters out UV light – will this be a problem for optimal growth? I believe plants use light on the blue end of the spectrum at about 450 nm and I think UV is under 400nm so I didn’t think the glass would be an issue but have recently been reading some contradictory information in regards to UV light and plant growth. Any information you can share would be greatly appreciated! I’m really looking forward to reading about your greenhouse project in the future too! Once again thank you for your time!
Sincerely,
Ben in Oregon (USA)
Hello Ben! Thank you for your very kind words on my blog, I am happy to hear that you enjoy it. 🙂
About outside air… well, I think it is an important ingredient to healthy plants. For the smaller intermediate vivariums I do not actively pull in any fresh air, but those cases are not completely air tight. There are some air vents (they were originally build to house reptiles) that provide some outside ventilation (outside air = the air inside my apartment, but I keep the window to the orchid room open for most of the year). The cool vivarium is a much more complex micro eco system however, with rain, fog, air and all, so there I think it is a bit more critical to keep all levels at an optimum there. I pull in plenty of fresh air every day since my cooling function for most of the year is to blow in cool outdoors air. Killing two birds with one stone you might say. I hope you will like your scythe circulation fans, I think they are fantastic! They help move the cooler air to prevent cold (or hot) spots inside.
Good idea to think about how to block the heat from the lights, but I would be a little bit concerned about how much of the “good light” the glass is blocking, but to be honest with you, I am not really up to speed on how much or if you should be concerned… sorry. Please let me know if you find out! I help diverting heat from the top of my glass (4 mm thick) by placing wine corks in between the light fixture and the glass, whole corks for summer, half corks in the winter. Very high tech… Once or twice during extra warm days I have put a fan up there as well to help lead the heat away.
I wish you the best of luck with your vivarium project!
fantastic greenhouse…this sounds exciting! I wisk you good luck for this new project!
Thank you very much! 🙂
Beautifull!
Thanks! 🙂