So this is the Potting House and it got its
name because, originally, this is where
the potting bench was, and most of
the potting was done. And I can remember, as young boy,
always coming through the door, here, and
hearing them tapping and moving flats.
And, you know, people standing at benches
potting up the young cuttings.
What we use this for now, is a display in
a retail area for our customers.
This is a very bright house; it's very
warm, meaning we keep it probably about
63-65 minimum temperature. It has quite
a bit of light on it, so it's a good
place to grow high-light needing
or flowering tropicals that need a lot of
light. One of the plants that you can see
that's kind of hanging out in the
front, here, is our Plumbago indica. This is
the Winter Plumbago. Presently, we're in
December, so we're right at the bottom--
the shortest days. Plants that flower on
short day-length are in bloom right now. It is
probably in, you know, for those of us who live at
Logee's, its lowest time of year in terms of
flowers and plants vigor, and so on. If
you walked in here you wouldn't notice it,
but for those of us that live here, this
is like the bottom, and we're going to
wait another four weeks and we'll come
out of it; things to start to become more
active. Here's another plant that works very
well as a Winter Bloomer; this is
'Thunbergia grandiflora.' You can see the, I
think it's called a Clock Vine; common name is a
Clock Vine. It flowers very heavily
throughout the winter time; see these
buds, these sprays of buds. And this will
actually, this plant will actually be in
bloom now, probably up until June, so it's
just beginning its flowering cycle. The only
trick to it is, it's a vine, so you have
to constantly contain it; you see we wind it around.
There's a lead, right there, that's
running up, out into space; we're going to
pull that back, and wrap that around it,
so we can contain it. This is the
Bougainvillea Pink Pixie, which is really, kind of in
a semi-dormant state right now,
because of the low light level, although
Bougainvilleas do like to flower
on shortening day-length, so they're
responding to the daylight shortening
that happened during the fall, so we
still have some blooms on it. This is our 'Begonia
Wightii' -- 'Maculata' variety Wightii. And, you
can see the flowers on it, even in the
wintertime. The plant is-- it actually gets a
little deeper color, if we didn't have so
much sunlight on it, but it's pretty, it's pretty
quite a bit of light here, and again
here is our 'Plumbago indica,' and what show
that puts on. And what happens is,
these flowers come out off of that, they
just keep coming, and this will bloom
will bloom this right up until probably
May, this'll be in flower. You can see that,
well, this is an older plant; smaller plants you
could contain more, but an
old plant, like this, can get to be quite a
large specimen, and very quickly. This was
actually-- a plant like this was cut back
very hard in July, maybe going into
August-- we probably did a hard pruning on it
just to contain it, and you can see the
growth that's come out from that. This is 'Medinilla myriantha'
that's pretty much, of all the
Medinillas, this is probably the freest-blooming one,
as a couple others, but of the showiest ones,
this is 'Medinilla myriantha' and you can see, in December
the plant is still in bloom, here, for us--
and will continue to flower. I mean, we've got
young buds coming out, and makes--
it puts on a pretty good show.
These really, the flowers are just
these little pink things, and then these
bracts kind of hold on and then, in time they
actually go into fruit, and so there's,
you know, it's many, many, months that the
inflorescence coming out of this puts on
a quite a good show. There's 'The Path'
which is-- this is yesterday's bloom
of Hibiscus 'The Path,' which is one of our
oldest showy Hibiscus cultivars. And you can
see the plant up here's got plenty of buds
coming on it. There'll be more buds probably
opening- there's one up there probably opening
today or tomorrow; and so, even in the
dead of winter, we still got a pretty
good show from that. We have Passion
Flower vines that we've trained on the wall.
These are, really, not so much in bloom right
now, because the daylight is a little short.
There are some winter-blooming varieties,
and we'll show you some of those later,
in one of the other houses. But this is
just a place where we keep a reservoir
of stock. And by the way, most of
everything in Logee's-- all of our mother
plants and display plants, we use these
as propagation material for our young cuttings.
And, you know, this is often used as a
outside plant, bedding plant, for
summertime, but, Thunbergias, and this is
'Sunlady,' which is one of our better
flowering clones of Thunbergia. It's an
'Alata' hybrid, I believe-- but it's one of the better
clones of that. And you can see that in the wintertime,
it's still in bloom. And we have 'Reinwardtia
indica,' here. This is the- Golden Flax, I
think, is the name of it. Just a winter
bloomer, it's just going out of flower
right now-- may come into another burst of
blooms before the end of the season, but
in the dead of the winter, you can have some
brilliant yellow flowers from this
wonderful little potted plant. And that's the Potting House.