Thanks to all of you who have responded. Peter, I've used evaporative coolers before (in Michigan, of all places) but I doubt they would reduce the ambient temperature enough to really make a success of growing any of the cooler plants. My hypothesis is that by moving the evaporation to the roots, I can have a greater impact. We'll see, I guess.
Thanks for the suggestion on water. I'll follow up. I lived right across from the water treatment plant in East Lansing--should have thought of that. I suspect I'll go back to using RO, as I did in MI (hard ground water). I know that growers in the L.A. area in the past, anyway, had issues with bad air quality. I'll have to check in with Norman Fang (whose business is in the next town to where I'm working--uh oh, temptation ahead) on what the current status of that is. If I live in the mountains above any smog, it won't be an issue. However, I'm also aware that Southern CA has made tremendous strides in recent years on this issue, and would be curious to know if air quality is still a problem for orchids there. Comments from anyone on the ground, so so speak? Most of my orchids are still in MI, in fact, (thank you Rob Halgren)! I will probably leave some of them there permanently. If I can find a place with a basement (either old construction or hillside home), I suspect a lot more would be possible. Even in the hottest summers in MI, I don't think the temperature ever went over 80 down there, if that. And that was with the lights on. Maybe run the lights at night, as in desert climates it's quite a bit cooler then. As for disas, I'm observing that they seem to do best with their feet in water 24 x 7. I'm thinking that planting them in clay pots, placed in a tray of water. Of course for orchids that don't want to be that wet, the two pot idea might work well. We'll see. As for relearning, you're right. I've gone from MI greenhouse to MI under lights (I grew really great phals down there, if I must say so myself: they are all now dead 8-( ) to Seattle greenhouse. The joys of learning! But the more I learn about the principles, the more I can apply them in a variety of environments and come up with some "best practices." I've grown phals fairly wet, trying a variety of methods. I think horse manure was best with a "mud mix" almost as good. But I found that watering them every day was too much. I found that those growing under lights were the ones that were more likely to grow air roots and in the greenhouse they went down. Go figure! As for Google, interlibrary loan doesn't discriminate on the basis of age or whether they are copyrighted or not (I should know, I'm a librarian that has managed that service). However, many of the rarer items may not be circulated for that reason. As for disassembling the books, I haven't looked at their method in detail, and I know that in the past "disbinding" the books was a practice used on materials that are not particularly rare and that a library was willing to "sacrifice" (think old National Geographics!) Many libraries have resisted this, and certainly wouldn't allow it for anything even approaching rare. One exception to that is the University of Michigan, which in its American Memory project did exactly that. However, I'm sure they also checked to make sure that other libraries had copies. It was and is controversial. I am quite confident that neither Harvard nor Oxford would allow it, and am doubtful that Stanford or NY Public would either. I recall seeing a picture of a machine that could open the book and scan both sides of a page without any damage to the book at all. I'll check on it. As for what they scan first, my understanding is that 4 of the 5 libraries will ONLY allow them to scan the out-of-copyright. Only UM is scanning it all. It will be interesting to watch progress on the project. As luck would have it, this morning the Seattle Times had an article about Amazon's plans to sell pages/chapters from books that it has electronic full text for. It's kind of like iTunes for music--buy songs rather than albums, and it's called Amazon Pages. At present, Amazon has online full text of half of the books it sells which it has called "Search inside the book." Customers can pay a few cents per page, and if they like the book enough can then upgrade to a full electronic or print copy. Random House is also going to initiate pay-per-page. The article also states: "On Thursday, the company [Google] launched a related initiative in which it makes the text of out-of-copyright books searchable." Icones--ask and ye shall receive! <g> Exciting times, indeed. I suspect pay-per-page might be quite attractive to orchidists, given that I believe many times we're just looking for a fact or a picture here and there. The link, for those interested is Full story: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002602993_amazon04 .html . Obviously for Seattle it's a local story. Signing off, Harvey in a still wet Seattle _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
