I promised you a tour of the propagation facility so let's have a look around and it all starts on
these misting benches here uh you see those white uprights on the left hand side of the screen
those are misters and they go off for about three or four seconds every 10 to 15 minutes or so
depending on the weather and down here i want to show you these cuttings and pull one out here and
just lay it across and see if i can focus on that you can see that it is completely unrooted and
that's the way they come in just cleanly cut from the stem of the plant held in these conditions
until they root now how long does that take well it depends on the conditions
so the mist is great we're doing these on a natural light over on the other side of the house
we run them under grow lights so those ones go a little bit faster also they're on heated benches
so anywhere in the range from a few days to about a couple weeks after going under this mist
you'll see that these plants have little roots or little callus across the bottom
where they're pulling moisture up themselves from the soil at that point we remove them from
the mist and i'll show you there's another bench over here same thing that's a misting
bench so all of these are unrooted cuttings and all of these are started for the 2021 season
at which point after they root we move them onto these benches over here which are still watered
by overhead irrigation but they are not misted to the same frequency as the ones on the mist bench
now this whole greenhouse is a controlled environment we try to keep it in the range
of 25 to maybe 27 degrees celsius that's nearing 80 degrees fahrenheit so that's
the temperature the light levels well as i say natural light on this side with uh grow lights
on the other side to to encourage rooting development we maintain the temperature either
through heat the bench heat so that we have a little boiler it's not a big one but it's fine for
controlling the benches in this size of greenhouse and we have a little boiler and then we have
backup heaters and that's what you see going at the far end there at the top of the greenhouse
that's a moting heater that just pumps in a little more temperature on a cooler day like this one
it also has circulating fans at the top there i've turned those ones off just temporarily because
they're background noise on the video but normally we would have the circulating fans the other thing
we do to control conditions in here is we either string shade or use a shade on the outer
poly of the greenhouse during the summer and at the far end there i'll zoom in a little
bit at the far end of the greenhouse that sort of dark colored wall you see there that's a vent pad
and what that does is that it has moisture in it it has an opening to the outside air outside there
and on the other side of the greenhouse directly across from us you'll see a giant fan in the
summer when it starts to get warm in here those fans will turn on that vent pad panel will open
and it will pull moist air through the greenhouse acting as evaporative cooling in the greenhouse
to try to bring the the temperature down and the humidity up and it creates kind of a gentle
airflow across the greenhouse which then creates you know really good conditions for rooting
so there are a couple things about this greenhouse that are kind of interesting or special to me one
of course is that it's the company i work for so i take a special interest in what comes through here
second of all is that i'm a grower of perennials a gardener and substantially this greenhouse here
if you live in western canada and you've grown perennials in your garden
there's a very good chance that some of the perennials in your garden started their
lives on these benches and that i had a hand in growing them at least in the last 10 years or so
so it's a small greenhouse it's not not huge by industry standards let's say might be huge for
home standards but for by industry standards it's not huge but we pump a lot of plants through here
here's another misting bench this one doesn't do it through those uprights but does through mists
like that and i'll if i stand here long enough i'll probably get hit by some oh there's the
mist going on the other bench right now and it's not big by by by industry standards but because we
are able to root plant so quickly on these benches graduate them onto these benches to grow on with
some temperature you see these ones here have grown up quite nicely and are probably ready for
a bit of a trim or a haircut pretty soon just to get them to uh to branch again from the base
and then from there once they're at that stage and we've given them that trim we move them on
to another house a cooler house for hardening off so now that i've mentioned all of that the other
cool thing i like about this greenhouse is that the propagators here are very very experienced
and they love to experiment so marcel who's the propagation manager and jesse who's been working
in this propagation department for i think around 35 years now they play around they're always
experimenting with something so i'll give you an example this one here is a plant that we got
last fall and sorry i'm going to give you a good look at the tag here last fall we found one really
bad looking condition plant of this in the garden center uh it's a lavender cotton or
santolina virons and what we did is we just put it in jesse's hand and say go at it you know go to it
and what she did is she's created now uh 18 mother plants that we can use here and by the time we get
into either you know later this spring or into the summer we may be able to turn this into a
full crop of plants which i think is the most exciting thing on earth you find a cool plant
in the garden center you take some cuttings if you're permitted to do so in this case it's not a
patented variety and then you end up with a crop that you can sell i'm going to show you some other
cool stuff just bear with me i have to move some benches to get you there so i'm always finding
cool things that either marcel has put in here or jesse has started on her own this one here is a
plant called manfreda maculosa i love that those dots are not they're not actually a disease or a
problem it's just a polka dotted plant which is kind of cool so that's a new one to me these are
some more tropicals that we just started this is monstera deliciosa i believe from tissue culture
and over here we have a philodendron this is philodendron birkin it's quite young yet
but i like the leaves it looks like it has kind of a a stippled pattern on that leaf so kind of cool
i want to show you over here there's a sansevieria that they've rooted
and this one here is an interesting plant it doesn't look so impressive yet but you can see how
it zigzags the stems zigzag on that it's a kind of a euphorbia it actually has a different name
but they call it devil's backbone and it sort of zigzags back and forth i'll show
you maybe you can see better on this one how it has that sort of zigzag pattern on the
on the stems very cool like that and again just a stock plant we came up with in a different
uh garden center that we thought that would be neat let's make a crop out of it this is a kind
of an aloe we don't get too many interesting aloes up here in canada because there's cytes
restrictions and moving aloes but we came across some stock plants these ones were propagated
by pups so we separated pups from the base of the mother plant and ended up with all sorts
of aloes here including another one over here this is aloe hedgehog that's kind of more spiny
than that i wanted to show you something very cool here so i'm gonna get a good view on this
and these are a kind of a jasmine it's a star of india jasmine and i don't know how jesse
figured to do this it wouldn't have made sense to me but she just took leaves off the plant
and stuck them in the tray under our good rooting conditions and suddenly if you pull up on them
you can see that they've rooted down to the bottom of the plug
so from a leaf and there are some plants that do leaf cuttings it's just you kind of have to know
which ones and i guess jessie either knew that or she had an intuition that it would and so
you end up with these uh these leaves that callous across the base of the leaf and create those roots
but where does it go from there that's the question well here's where it goes i'm gonna
get you a close-up here but you can see at the base of another one of these she's pulled it out
it's gone from callusing at the bottom and and rooting and now you can see a new shoot coming
up so this will turn into another star of india jasmine and that's a woody plant it's like a tree
or a small tree for for warmer climates so that's kind of neat
back to the unlit side of the greenhouse and we are traditionally a grower of perennials that's
the majority of what we've been growing here for years but obviously nothing stays the same in the
horticulture industry you always want to try new things here's a big crop of tradescantia that's a
kind of a neat stripy leaf on tradescantia there and this is some of the stuff that
we're diversifying into we've done a ton with tropicals we've done a ton with succulents
and it's really just about staying agile and growing what the market demands and that's what
we're doing here so we still have our business in perennials we're still doing quite well with it
but uh and that's what what these all are is starting for our for our next season
but that being said you never stand still otherwise you may become irrelevant i guess
i'll finish up the tour here looking at some stock plants and you'll find that around this
greenhouse it's a it's an organized greenhouse when it comes to the crops but the stock plants
we cram those in every corner to get the condition good of all the plants that we found that we're
interested in that one is a society garlic over there we don't find that too readily in canada
and anything we find that we want to keep in good condition to take cuttings off of it
we put into uh sort of nooks and crannies of this greenhouse there is the mother plant of that
devil's backbone we talked about but anything we find that is cool and interesting and we'd like to
try uh we will stick it over into sections of the greenhouse and hold it as a mother plant and then
jesse when time allows will go and pluck away at it and see what is the best method to propagate it
all right thanks for coming with me on the tour of this propagation facility you may have noticed
as i did this that i didn't mention the name of the business that i'm working at here that's not
because of any reluctance on my part to associate myself with this business it's really just because
the ownership is actually changing the name of this business and they're in the midst
of doing that so that's not my particular cat to let out of this particular bag so
i'm gonna leave that privilege to the ownership to announce the new name of the business
however if you did enjoy this style of video where we're looking at the growing facilities
there are a lot more growing facilities that we could explore here and i'd be happy to do so and
maybe i'll do that in conjunction with the release of the name of the company the new name of the
company and i can introduce you to all the growing facilities together let me know in the comments of
the video if that's something you'd be interested in and once again thank you so much for watching