Water lily maintenance

Before arriving for this weeks activites in the greenhouse, I was informed some of the staff had been exposed to covid, and were home in quarantine. Curator J... had issued an email earlier in the week, which outlined the current guidelines regarding covid.

My first task was to empty a large bathtub-size tank. It contained a few water lilies which failed to grow well. They remained too small to be adequate examples of their species. The tank also features a small floating fern. A asked me to save the fern into a glass jar, along with the tank’s bubble tube. The lilies were discarded.

I emptied the tank and washed the sides of the adhering algal growth, rinsed the tank, and left it on its side to dry.

I repotted a couple of small hibiscus plants native to Kauai (Hibiscus clayi), Hawaii (family Malvaceae). They were placed in new plastic “azalea” pots with relatively shallow depth (5 inches or so). A asked for soil 1a. She also asked us to desist from using paper towels in the bottom of pots because they stayed too wet.

Finally, I walked through the display rooms picking up leaves and pruning leaves off plants.

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Rebuilding the support for vanilla vines

Raining in February The morning began with a walk in the rain from my car to the Conservatory greenhouses - in the month of February. According to the calendar, we should be in the depths of winter. The precipitation today should be snow not rain. The storm system that we're experiencing is probably related to drenching rains moving inland from the west coast. I met Coordinator A... at the door of the Conservatory. His office desk faces one of the main doors to the building. He cannot escape observing everyone who enters...poor guy, it must be distracting for him. Anyway, as soon as I entered the building we started to discuss his plan for my activity of the morning. He offered me the project of rebuilding the support for vanilla vines which have been suffering from overexposure to sunlight and dry air. A bit of background The vanilla plant (Vanilla planifolia) is in the orchid family. It is native to Central America and Mexico. The seed pods were used by the Aztecs to flavor coc

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