Tender plant jottings

Loving the Clerodendrums @PeterS !
I grew C.thomsoniae a few years ago and it does romp away. Sadly it perished in the garage over the winter of 2010/11.
I bought a reduced C.wallachii a few months ago.....................


And thanks for the info on Aeschynanthus. I tend to agree that light is the most important thing with these. Cold as last winter was outside, it was at least bright and my Mona Lisa bloomed well. This winter (IMO) has been rather dark and it is not anywhere near as happy.

Good luck in N.Korea

 

I like the Clerodendrons Also, Longk and Peter.
Not wanting to appear ungrateful Longk, but you sent me some cuttings of Clerodendrum ugandense last spring, and the flowering was very sparse.
Not like those types in your pics.

 

Please don't look at the photos that I'll be posting in the next week then!

Seriously though, it will pick up.

 

Top Trumps! Pretty sure that, of all the Alocasias, is the one that Dave Brown @ HTUK favours. Have half a feeling that keeping it growing (with enough heat) is pretty important as (if I have remembering correctly) getting it out of dormancy a) takes time and b) is not certain.

You should have bought two. Not just because the price is good, but also because two look good - at either ends of a sideboard, or similar.

If you are going back to get the other one can you take my shopping list with you please?

 

Pete - I know nothing about Citrus - so I may well have not got this right. I am looking for something ornamental rather than edible, and something that will take a minimum of 10C (and put up with my humidity) overwinter. But Googling again, one site said that it won't grow much over 3 feet (36 inches) - well its 33 inches now and I would be disappointed if that was its maximum height. I would really like something of 6 feet. But I am not limited to just one citrus plant - just limited in space.

I keep thinking about the humidity - I don't like it, and am not sure what to do. I am not even convinced that a fan would do anything. I think a fan works by blowing away air which is very humid in a highly localised spot and replacing it with less humid air. However if the entire room is 100% humid I can't see that moving the air around will achieve anything. I am loathe to open windows when its a lot colder outside, because it will reduce the internal temperature locally as well as increasing the heating cost. The ideal, of course, would be to suck cold air in from outside, heat it up first then release it into the building.

I managed to get away, reasonably unscathed, with my previous summerhouse. That had no ventilation and was full of condensation - I lost very few plants. So I will just see what happens.

The Beaucarnea may well be a failure, from what you say. It was a spur of the moment purchase based on being cheap - I didn't know anything about it when I bought it. My gardening experience consists of nearly as much error as there was trial.

LongK - I had never seen or heard of Clerodendron wallachii before - though I should have known that you would have it.

Mowgley - I agree, I think the most exciting of all those plants might be the Alocasia 'Calidora'. Particularly because I had been wanting a giant elephants ears for some time and had no idea that that is what it was when I bought it.

Kristen - yes that was my understanding, that Alocasia is difficult to revive from a tuber. I almost used Dave Brown's own picture as my illustration, but I thought the scale was better shown with a person standing there.

Unfortunately the nursery is a round trip of 110 miles. So I don't get there very often. That's why I bought so many things without knowing exactly what they were.

 

I think the fan stops the moulds growing, and that's it. I don;t know why moving 100% humid air around would achieve that? Perhaps the air movement encourages evaporation from surfaces (even thought the air is very humid) and thus the plant surfaces are dry/drier than otherwise?

Definitely worked for me!

 

Kristen - thanks for all your help and encouragement.

Whilst I hadn't replied to your last post, your points had not been ignored. In fact the whole problem of condensation has been floating round my head for some time.

Some time ago, I was told that dehumidifiers were very inefficient at low temperatures, which put me off.

However today I was doing a bit of research and came across the Meaco site http://www.meaco.com/proddetail.asp?prod=10L , which had the above graph. Indeed it does show that the extraction rate falls off as the temperature drops, but even at 10C (and 100% humidity - ie my conditions) the Meaco 10L should extract 3 litres per day - that's more than I am removing by hand every day and should be enough. Curiously the graph for the larger 20L shows that it extracts twice as much at high temperatures, but almost exactly the same at 10C. So I have just ordered a Meaco 10L dehumidifier. I will let you know how I get on.

I have been removing the condensation each day by hand, scraping the condensation off the (almost) flat roof into a container - hence I can measure how much condensation there was. This is possible, whilst the plants are small and the roof is clear. But if I had climbers stretched across wires across the roof, as I would like, it would be impossible. So a proper solution is needed. Dehumidifiers can use quite a bit of electricity, but this will be turned into heat and so may not all be wasted.

 

From a personal point of view I prefer to leave the stems of hollow stemmed herbaceous plants in situ (if possible) over the winter. As I see it, it stops the heart of the plants rotting from the inside out due to damp. Although if the winter carries on as mild as it has been I doubt that it'll be too much of an issue.

 

LongK - This was Lobelia tupa and the plants were inside my garden room, so hopefully won't get any water down them. Otherwise I would agree with you - that I don't cut down any herbaceous plants in the border until the spring.

But I think there may be a north/south divide on this. I leave top growth as protection against the cold as much as for any other reason, but I think in the warmer south some people are more inclined to tidy their borders in the autumn.

 

Ah. I see! My Tupas all look a mess, but after last winter I'm much more confident that they'll come through. The one that was outdoors all winter last year was the best performer by far in 2013.

Not here. I dislike the winter anyway, so I'll be indoors until March anyway!

 

I would agree with you LongK. A lot of people like to have a garden with year round interest. For me that's a waste. Like you I am inside over winter so I would rather concentrate my garden on summer flowering. That's not to say that you can't have structure all year round including winter.

I now have a number of books on tender plants and have been reading more, and have decided that 10C is a good winter temperature for a garden room/conservatory. Most plants will continue to keep their leaves and grow slowly at that temperature. If they go much below they can go dormant and drop their leaves, but they can then take a lot longer to re-emerge in the spring. I have experienced exactly this with Brugmansia. Also there are quite a few plants, shrubs as well as bulbs, that won't flower well the following year if they don't have a cold period of around 10C over the winter. And there is a third category that will try to flower all year round at higher temperatures and will flower themselves to death if they don't have a rest over the winter.

 

Not sure about dehumidifying, but I'll be interested to hear how much water you manage to pull out of the air. You might be worse-case in the first year as presumably the block work is also drying out?

My thought is that if heated to 10C, so that it is water than external, then saturates fresh air will enter, and be warmed, and relative humidity will fall (but I don't know to what percentage). You will get condensation on cold surfaces, such as glass (because temperature of the glass falls, relative humidity in the air next to the glass rises, and gets to 100% then condensation forms), but I don't think that is representative of the air in the middle?

(Do you have a humidity meter?)

Having a large garden I am lucky that I can have both. I don't find my garden exciting in winter - in the sense that I wouldn't walk around it with someone who had come to lunch on a Sunday. I have heavy clay, the ground is squelchy, and there isn't much to see when you get there ... its fine if I personally am walking round, but its definitely best described as "out of season"! ...

... so instead I have allocated an area, readily visible from where we sit in the kitchen, for Autumn leaf colour, and Winter colour (dogwoods and the like, and some bulbs). I also have a bit of sort-of-woodland that stretches around the North West and North sides, where I have planted snowdrops. Actually there is a L-shaped path around the perimeter, and (after being here 7 years!) it was only the other day, when walking it with Mrs K, that she said "Why is this L-shaped straight-line path here?". She's right of course, so I'm going to create a new path that winds in and out of the trees, and plant up the straight-line L-shaped path. This winter I will move any snowdrops in the line-of-fire of the new path, to one side or the other, to free up the new route.

So if ever we have a Sunday lunch guest who wants to see the garden in Winter, then we will walk the winter path Let me know when you are coming and I'll get a nice Wing Rib in

 

Yes I have 3. Two electronic ones, that always say 99% or sometimes blank - which might mean 100%. And a mechanical one that says 80%. I am tempted to believe the electronic ones, as every morning there is heavy condensation and logic says that that indicates 100% humidity - most of the time the temperature is constant, though if the sun comes out during the day it can rise another 2 0r 3 degrees. Last night was -4C and there was more condensation than usual. After scraping it off, I measured it - exactly 1 litre. But I use a couple of old towels to wipe down the roof and windows, and I suspect they account for another 25% or so.

 

Crikey - I can't even get structure in the summer! Plants get put where I think that they'll thrive.

Totally agree. At my old house that was the winter low in my conservatory and I was growing and blooming Tacca. I tried to keep watering to a minimum and as a result the plants were just ticking over.
Being attached to the house helped with humidity issues too (I think), as did bringing the plants in fairly dry.
I do wonder whether next year (with a years experience up your sleeve) you'll have the same levels of humidity?

 

Kristen - Tacca is one that I would love to try. Its a very unusual plant, but a local garden centre does have some and I will certainly get one, now that I have somewhere to keep it.

I have for several years overwintered a lot of plants inside my house, in the hall and in a spare bedroom - both under lights. But I have never had any problems with condensation. In a house or conservatory attached to a house there is much more space that doesn't have plants and a much greater circulation of air. In my garden room there is no circulation of air and a very high concentration of plants.

In the past I had a summerhouse where I overwintered plants. The problem there was exactly the same, except that in that case I rarely removed any of the condensation. A lot of the dead material - flowering stalks and leaves went mouldy. I lost very few plants - and those that I did lose were probably due to the cold (just frost free) rather than the damp - the exception being Echiums that hate any trace of damp. The main damage was to the fabric of the building - mould grew into the woodwork and paint work and looked very unsightly.

Other than remove the condensation, the only thing I can do is to take the pots in earlier in the autumn, before they fill up with the rain. The shear surface area of all the leaves involved will mean that there is a large exhalation of water vapour, what ever I do. But I will be interested to see if a dehumidifier works.