An Orchid Addiction Evolves...

In the Beginning:  I have been an orchid addict all my life..., uum, I mean... I have been in business for nine years.  It all started innocently enough.  When I was about 13 years old, way back in 1973 my aunt who was visiting from Hawaii brought me an orchid plant.  By the late 1980s I had amassed several thousand and realized I was in deep trouble.  There was no place to sit or sleep in my home.  The collection was costing me a fortune in time and money to care for.  All of my friends had drifted away.  I slept little.   And I always had these little orchid bark splinters in my hands from repotting.   It had all become too much.  I decided I needed to simplify my life and so I sold or gave away all but about 12 favorite plants which I pretended were regular house plants least I loose my self control.  The "O" word was not allowed and people who had known me during the 80s knew not to mention it.  Then around 1995 a new friend who recognized that I had a few orchids gave me a new one as a gift and all hope was lost.  I started collecting them again at a furious rate. 

This time, however, I told them they would have to support themselves if they were going to come live with me again in such large numbers and my "business" was born.  I put the word "business" in quotes because looking back I should have been more specific.  I should have told the orchids that they could come back if  they supported ME.  But just like before it has turned out to work the other way.  Through sales, they do support their own upkeep with regard to space and resources, but I am their slave.  Again!   Hold on...  I'll be back...  I have to go tweeze a sliver of bark out of  my typing finger.

Okay, so now, again, I spend all my time making sure they are happy and all they do is take, take, take.  And they keep coming.  More and more every year...  I used to joke that I wanted them all.  But as it turns out this is a perfect example of that old caution: "be careful what you wish for..."

Aliens In The Basement:  Between 1996 and 2000 I grew plants in my basement under lights and summered them outside in a hoop house covered with shade cloth.  Eventually I had filled two 45 x 15 foot rooms.  The lamps in the picture below contain 1000 watt High Pressure Sodium bulbs.  They gave off lots of heat and used to warm the floorboards in the house above during the winter.  Also, they stayed on about 16 hours a day so at times when lights were turned off upstairs and people were trying to sleep, great bright shafts of lights would pour up through cracks in the floorboards which gave the impression that perhaps aliens were living in my basement.  During these years I sold orchids by mail order on the internet under the name "Al's Orchid Basement" and was open to customers by appointment only.

The Greenhouse  The picture above of one of the orchid rooms downstairs was taken around the winter of 1998.  I no longer grow orchids in the basement, except for the light carts that hold the 500 or so flasks of baby hybrid and species orchids I have made over the last few years from adult plants I now grow outside in a greenhouse.

In the spring of 1999 I realized I would not be able to fit all the plants back inside after a summer's worth of growth  in the hoophouse so I set about to get a greenhouse built and had a 30 x 48 foot structure erected behind my garage by that fall.  Below is a picture of the greenhouse interior taken in October of 1999 just after all the plants from the basement moved in.  It looks kind of empty and I thought it would take me a decade or more to fill all that extra space.  It was about this time that I changed the name of the business to "Al's Orchid Greenhouse" and established hours of operation when I would be open to customers without the need to make an appointment.

Well, it took less than five years to fill the tiny little space in the picture above to bursting.  The picture below was taken by a customer in January 2004 who was entering the greenhouse from the door in the above picture and shows all the bench work built to hold my swelling collection and sale plants during the intervening years.

The Greenhouse Expansion:  To make a long story short, lets come back to the present day: June 14th 2004.  I have just finished an expansion project that doubles the greenhouse footprint.  The structure is now 30 feet wide by 100 feet long and there is about 3600 square feet of multilevel bench space all dedicated to orchids (they wouldn't have it any other way).  I recently finished converting the garage of my home into a head house where orchid repotting chores and mail order box packing can be done conveniently.  The head house is connected to the greenhouse and provides a front door entrance to customers wanting to look around.  While working to secure a "Wayside Stand" permit from the county that would allow me to sell plants from my property I was told that I needed to add a parking lot so now there is space for 4 visitors to park up near the greenhouse entrance.  It's all beginning to look and feel like a real business.

Below are a few pictures of the expansion project taken in June 2004 during the last stage of the expansion when the old greenhouse skin was pulled down and the new longer skin was pulled over.  This happened very quickly on a cloudy windless morning.  If you want to see what it looks like inside NOW, you are welcome to visit during regular business hours.  Check out the online catalog, which is I update every month to reflect a sampling of currently available orchids for sale.

If you have read this far, well... you are probably on your way to becoming as big an orchid addict as I am.  I'm so sorry...