G’day, Paul! Good to see you here. I like the idea of using the re-cycled fencing panels to make a greenhouse! I’ll have to look out for these myself for sure!
Possums are a real problem here. They’ve recently stripped my gigantea completely of all its buds and leaves… it seems that I will never get to use gigantea because something ALWAYS happens to it to prevent it from flowering… I need to try some of that product called ‘Poss-Off’ (which is similar to what I can sometimes be heard instructing the possums to do at night around here) to see if I can get them to poss-off and leave gigantea alone. The legs under the bench are a great idea and I will do a redesign this weekend to see if I can incorporate this into the plan. Thanks!
Hi Simon. I finally got around to renewing my membership of RHA and saw the new forum up and running. A quick read and interaction and I got motivated to go out this monring and take better care of my seedlings. The last two seasons have seen me move house to acreage and the long road to re-establishing a garden and space for hybridising. This goes along with building fences and renovating the house inside… oh and working full-time.
I bought my shadehouse second hand for $800 about a 1 1/2 hour drive away and disassembled and re-assembled it with new cloth. I should have used white cloth in hindsight as I later found plants don’t photosynthesize properly in green light.
The bench was from steel fence sheets left in the rubbish collection on the footpath two doors down from me. I have a left over one that I will now create a new bench from as I am running short on space. I used 32mm nb steel posts concreted in the ground for legs and rails along the length. These were salvaged from a pile my neighbor has of them. The hanging cat with marble eyes apparently scares the possums too. I had some initial problems with possums when I didn’t have the overhangs at the ends. I just changed the length of the top a little and it seems to have fixed it (touch wood). I use bread trays to hold pots on the benches. Yellow represents roses I have bred and black are understock or others.
There is another long bench with a shade cover and another small shadehouse behind the big one. These have palm seedlings in them.
For a perspective on scale they are 5000 gallon (22,000 liter) water tanks. This weekend’s job is an automated sprinkler system on my outdoor benches.
I added a pic for Kim of my seedlings in the mist house. Thanks for the kind comments Kim. I got my ideas from articles written by everyone on this site. Initially Jim Sproul and Paul Barden’s sites got me underway on my hybridizing. The foreground is transplanted seedlings in 3" tubes. I start them in 2" deep punnets. I used to use foam boxes but found them too hard to prick seedlings from.
Paul… when I used foam boxes I didn’t pick the seedlings from them. I culled straight from the box by just pulling them out and left the others in there with about 20cm of root run. Worked great until my chooks discovered them and decided to eat them rolls eyes
Paul H, great looking shade/seed raising house. A couple of questions, what is the shade rating, percentage wise of the green cloth and if you were to use white what would you use.
Paul I write all my seedling info of the cross in white out pen on the side of the tubes. Is very resistant to wear and when reusing the tube I just get a stanley knife and scrape it off . Very impressie setup there Paul.
Just a quick modification… if I just wrap a sheet of metal around each leg the possums can’t climb it. This is what we do around our power poles here. If I put cross braces on the possums will just use them use ladders so I just made the legs longer and made the rebate taller to allow me to use cross-patterned bolts to prevent slumping instead.
Simon, Great idea. I am going to do that to the timber frame at the back of my shadehouse.
David, I used 50% for most of the shadehouse. The closest to the shed has 70% on the roof for 1 1/2 metres as this is where my wife’s orchids are. I would also use 50% for white. I did some reading first and determined that 50% was what some hybridizers were using in the US in similar climates to Brisbane. I did a course in propagation at a Brisbane TAFE and they used white 50% for hardening off seedlings coming out of their glasshouse. They use the same foggers that I have. Pity I didn’t go there before building it all. I bought mine by the roll from a nursery agent up here in Queensland who were happy to sell to me. The foggers are Netafim Coolnet Pro and put a very fine mist across the area. I put a loinger delay in them today as everything was a little too wet.
Warren, I used to use a sticky label and a sharpie which lasted a season. The tried a white paint pen but found it clumsy to use. I now use a white chinagraph pencil that I bought from an art store. Officeworks sell them as glasochrom pencils - same thing. They are a waterproof pencil and write easily and seem to wear well so far. I will let you know how they wear through the season. It is what many nurseries use for writing on labels (using black ones) as you can rub it off if you are firm enough. I am trying to transplant 30 or 40 a day now to catch up. I will leave the open pollenations in the punnets and cull from there. They are OP of some of my past seedlings.
Hi Paul, I read that the Eucalyptus trees have a drip that kills most things underneath but don’t know if it’s true.
I once had a Norwegian Elkhound that would terminate any of the tens of thousands of possums that use to roam the streets if they got within reach of his rope. He got caught in a coyote trap one time and it didn’t break his leg but it was hard to spring the trap by hand.
The foggers/misters, what colour are they, I have the same in purple, mine came from a designated irrigation shop. I was looking for the same as the ones on my propagation bench. I am very happy with them. I placed mine straight into poly, not high tech like yours.
You also mention you delayed watering time, what sort of system have you got for that and I also guess because you are out of town water is from tanks/well. I am using a 'Galcon. E.Z ’ model 2040 run on 2 9v batteries.
Neil, yes some Eucs do have killing drip/sap but not all. One of the worst is the 'Bloodwood. As by the name you can envisage the color of the sap.
I have the white ones with the green pressure valves. I wanted the purple ones as they release at a lower pressure, but after testing the green ones worked fine. It was what was available from the irrigation shop up here.
My misting timer is a DIG 5006-IP that I bought from “The Drip Store” in the US. It cost me 79.12 US$ plus $41 shipping and I bought some other bits and pieces off them. I had to buy an 24V AC adaptor for 240V from the local electronics store. It will do 6 stations with 4 starts on any days. It also have a feature enabling starts every X minutes for however many seconds or minutes or hours. Mine is now 5 seconds every 10 minutes from 7am to 4pm. During summer it was 7 seconds every 5 minutes during daylight hours. INitially I was going to do every minute for a second but the press-control on the pump is set to support 20 starts an hour, so I didn’t want to test the fail point.
The high pressure pipe is a plus and a minus. It builds too much pressure so the system stops working. The irrigation shop guys were useless on this. A bit of trial and error and I set a second solenoid to release one dripper for one second every time the mist system goes off. Just releases enough pressure in the system. I tried pressure valves etc… which were all useless.
I am on town water, but use the tanks for the mist house. With a bigger pump I can use them for the rose garden too. We are on 2 1/2 acres only 14km from the CBD in the bayside area of Brisbane, so town water, but septic and no stormwater.
Ask me anything you like - no secrets in rose breeding from me.