Posted: 8/12/2026 10:55:01 PM EDT
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I'm recovering from a minor medical procedure and bored to tears so I'm going to make a long post. Hope it isn't too inappropriate for this forum. It is about our homestead. We built our current house in 1998. Shortly after moving in we were at Lowe's and my wife bought an orchid plant. Over the next few months more and more started showing up. At one point she had about 200 on shelves in our sunroom. I convinced her that she really needed a greenhouse. After a lot of research we bought and built a Gothic Arch 18X32 greenhouse and it was plenty big for several years. Then she got seriously into hybridizing and before long the greenhouse was packed. She was selling enough that about 5 years ago she turned it into a business and she needed a bigger greenhouse. In 2022 we built a 24X48 greenhouse and moved all the mature plants to it and the old greenhouse became the "baby" house She sells mostly small pre blooming size plants to collectors via a facebook page. She also sell some divisions of mature plants She considers herself a "boutique" hybridizer, making relatively small quantities of unusual crosses that the big growers wouldn't bother with. Her facebook page has quite a few followers and usually sells between 10 and 20 orders on weekends when the weather will be moderate enough for shipping the following week. She retired at the end of 2024 and now spends more time in the greenhouses than she ever did at her job. If anybody is interested I can post photos of the greenhouses being built and give details about the hybridizing and growing process. In short, it usually takes between 5 and 7 years from making a cross until they are true blooming size. This is the old greenhouse:  Full of babies  The newer one  Very little room left in it now.  Here are a bunch of photos of things that are blooming now or have bloomed recently. One of the babies blooming  Another baby  From the new greenhouse, some of these are her crosses and some are plants that she purchased as stud plants or just for her collection.                               Some seed pods    |
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Originally Posted By The_Wizard_Of_Odd: That is an amazing collection, thanks for posting. Until today I had never seen an orchid seed pod. My wife has never kept them alive long enough.  You have to manually transfer pollen from one flower to another to create a seed pod although occasionally (really rarely in a greenhouse) some random insect will do it for you. The seeds are tiny, like dust, and are sown into a special agar type media to get them to germinate. They normally stay in some sort of flask in sterile conditions for a year or more before they get big enough to put in a small pot. |
Born with a low tolerance for bullshit
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KY, USA
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That is amazing! Thank you so much for this post! I don't have time to read it like I want so will come back to it, but if I ever get the nerve to start a youtube channel or podcast maybe your wife could be my guest about orchids! I'm supposed to know how to grow stuff. But I know ZERO about orchids except that they're very different, they're ancient, and a lot of them are epiphytes. It's why I see them in stores and want them but not until I get a little time to learn what I'm even looking at. |
Nobody ever wakes me at 2 in the morning telling me that my grass is out on the highway.~~Radiopat
Wine is sunlight held together by water~~Galileo Galilei
Well-behaved women rarely make history~~Marilyn Monroe
Wine is sunlight held together by water~~Galileo Galilei
Well-behaved women rarely make history~~Marilyn Monroe
