Hanging steel cables for vine support

After a three-week absence (trip to Kyushu, Japan), I returned to the greenhouse on a sunny day with mild conditions. It was a joy to walk through the campus from the parking lot, then to pick up a coffee from the cafe on the edge of campus, and then on to the greenhouse. The garden plantings were filling out the flower beds, and the trees in full leaf. With most of the students away on summer holiday, the campus was very peaceful and quiet.

My tasks this week involved the vine bench in room C2 (tropical rainforest). Curator J... has moved some of the vine plants to another table since the current vine table is overstuffed with vines. Many of the plants didn’t have sufficient support or metal cables for crawling up. The new additional table has an overhead cable to which we can attach support cables. I used a bag of hardware from the cabinets in the workroom to crimp together 7 stainless steel cables. I hung each of the cables to one of the newly-moved pots. Then I attached the vines onto the new cables allowing the plants to grow upward rather and entangled with its neighbors.

Meanwhile, Curator J and student T were working on other vining plants in room C3. There, they were moving and trimming both “false jasmine” (Gelsemium sempervirens) and real jasmine (Jasminum officinale) onto a bench next to one of the walls. The bench has a large metal trellis to which the vines were to be attached. Just to add complexity to the concept, there is another plant called Stephanotis floribunda which produces a similar flower and scent, but it is in a different family from real jasmine, J. officinale.

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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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