Starting an Online Website selling Tropical Plants
- Jan 1, 2016
- 3 min read
Happpy New Year! Heres to my new business/hobby launching!!!
It was on my last holiday to Bali and Borneo that I decided to reduce my holiday blues, I would see what tropical plants I could grow successfully in my garden in Brighton, UK. After a little search on Ebay I discovered that you could grow a multitude of plants outside in the UK during the summer months,
Two weeks later my first Banana tree appeared at work in a box. It was a Musa Basjoo, a hardy type which looked like it had been lifted from a tropical beach and landed in the middle of my dental practice! I kept waking every morning to see that it had actually grown overnight and was constantly pushing out new leaves....I was hooked.
I then spent every spare minute after work researching what other plants I could have. The list started becoming endless, passion fruits, plumeria (frangipani), different bananas, gingers etc. I also found a fragrant plant called a Brugmansia, which had extremely fragrant flowers and looked beautiful. I did my first ever bid on one on Ebay and won! It arrived a week later, looking like a wilted tomato plant (its actually a close cousin). I duly planted it in a bigger pot. Again, every morning before work I would wake and rush down to see that it too had become bigger overnight. In fact, these plants start to become huge. It needed a bigger and bigger pot every two weeks. I seemed to suck up water and needed plants steroids (miracle grow) every 2-3 days. Then the first flower buds appeared!! They started so small but each day over a month got bigger and bigger, until one day in july my first Brugmansia flower appeared, Charles Grimaldi. That night I still remember the first time I smelt its fragrance. It was so different to what I had ever expected, or smelled before. It had an intoxicating heady smell that I could smell drifting through my living room. I now have over 10 different Brugmansia cultivars 8 months later!!. My two first plants grew to over 6 foot wide and high summer 2015!
I also by the end of the summer had a small collection of Plumeria cuttings sent from Thailand. I researched that you could root these, with some difficulty using a homemade soil mixture and an EGG!! Yes a raw egg would give it just he right amount of moisture and vitamins it required to root. They can rot very easily if given too much water, I read on the internet that lots of people struggled and killed them. I had 5 cuttings, and 6 weeks later (and every day looking through my cut in half mineral water bottles after work) discovered my first root! In fact, all 5 of my plumeria survived. Now these plants required at least 6 hours of sunlght and warmth to survive.......how was I going to keep these alive during our winter!
Now my research turned to grow lights. It also led me to some "dodgy" websites, to which people used these lights to grow other plants......but it did give my scientific mind some great information to use and think over, I suddenly became a knowledge base of lumens and spectrum use by plants of the different wavelengths for photosynthesis whether vegetative or flowering.
Come December 2015 I now have a total of 5 x 600Watt High powered dual spectrum High Pressure Sodium Lamps in my spare room. It has bee turned into small nursery for totally tropical plants.
I do hope this small intro has been of some interest, to anyone who has read this, I will continue soon continuing with my horticultural learning soon....
Happy New Year. May 2016 be a green and fragrant year!
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