My greenhouse etc... the first of a series of postings...

[Dorsetman]

This is the view from the south end. It is 15 foot wide, and is a design ( no longer made) called Hartley Botanic. The point of the half round shape is to maximise light gathering. Think of the classic Dutch House, with 75˚ sloping sides and a shallow 15˚ roof designed to suit The Netherlands ( on the same latitude as UK ) - this just takes those ideas a couple of steps further forward.
But it is expensive to manufacture - instead of single glazing bars for the roof there are 3 at each place, needing rigid connections, so the roof is supported on trussed arches.

There is a lot of other stuff to mention visible in this pic, but I'll get to it later.
The roof shape also means that the layer of polythen insulation - twin walled sandwiching large bubbles , usual in UK, has to be on the outside :-
Also on the outside now are roller blinds made of aluminum strip 60% shadecloth ( home made ) which I roll down for the summer, and roll up and secure at the ridge for the winter :-

These are amazingly effective ; when the sun shines on them, you can't look at the reflected light without being blinded.

The inside, the plants, the techie' in next postings.....

[Dorsetman]

The current arrangement of plants :-
This shows the left hand side, and the roof area ; the upper two rows of plants are mostly vandaceous, and the lower 3 or 4 ( 3 at some places where there are taller or larger plants, 4 at others where they are a bit smaller) are dendrobiums.
On the bench itself -
depending where you look, are paphs ( the last 50 or so of what was once my National Collection of these), phrags, brassias, oncidiums, Zygos, and Pleurothallids - I am getting rid of all Pleuros, to create more space for dendrobiums and cattleyas in particular.
The right bench is similar ;
The dendrobiums here are larger plants, so less layers, the blue trays , each about 30 x 20 inches ( 50 x 70cm ) are for S/H plants - mostly oncidiums - meaning the old multigenera things like Vuylstekearas, Withneraras, Odontocidiums, Colmanaras, and so on.
The centre bench is , for about 80 or 90% of its length, cattleyas :-


More in the next posting, and then the techie stuff.....

[Chris in Hamilton]

No problems with having the Vanda above the Dendrobium?

[JDT]

Nice setup Geoff with lots of interesting looking orchids!

[Ana Danaya]

Amazing your greenhouse, so many plants! Impressive!

[Aquii Finn]

Very healthy plants!!!great job!

[CattyRobb]

Wow! I'm jealous of all that growing space. Looks awesome.

[zainal abidin]

Awesome..Geoff now the plants arrangement were excellent and very neat are you do it by your self or somebody help and assist you? By the way ..Bravo for the wonderful Greenhouse.

[Dorsetman]

Awesome..Geoff now the plants arrangement were excellent and very neat are you do it by your self or somebody help and assist you? By the way ..Bravo for the wonderful Greenhouse.

All my own work , Zain. I get a little help when I am away for more than a few days, with the helper given instruction, and injunctions , such as "spray this line, from this tank, every three days. Spray nothing else, " etc. My present helper in this regard also does 2 or 3 hours in my garden each week, trimming hedges etc., he is an aircraft fitter/engineer made redundant from the nearby airport - knows nothing about plants r gardening, but seems capable of following instructions reliably and well......

[Dorsetman]

Further along the bench with tthe S/H I have my cymbidiums - about 200 pots of them. They were all repotted , with division of the larger plants, so that all most are probably flowering size if they grow well, and few are large flowering sioxze. I simply cannot lift a large cymbidium nowadays ( my age , no doubt ) and even an 8 inch or 10 inch pot, when well watered is more than I want to heave about ; at least I don't mind one, but doing a hundred... no way. So, automatic watering - which brings me to the start of my techie stuff. But first here is a pic of what some of them look like.

The new leaves are good - reach the glass above them, in some cases, and the headroom is never less than a metre often 1.5.
Water ( and nutrients) is stored under the central bench, in a series ( about 6 or 7) 250 litre tanks.


One of them for the cymbidiums contains an immersed pump, switched on for about an hour, twice a day. the water is fed to a computer



which opens the supply to a distributor



The distributor has 6 connections each for a separate drip line. I am using 4 at the moment. Each time the water supply is on, it shunts the connection to the next of the six. So in six operations of the pump, each line gets the water once. Obviously all the settings, like how many times per day, or week, and how long for each pump operation, can be changed on the computer.