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By Sandra Billeter at 2006-05-19 19:26
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  y husband and I have become addicted to orchids in the usual way. You buy one, then another and another and another, etc. We also went through the normal stages of growing them. You start on a window sill and then add humidity trays until your window sill is full and then you get a Baker’s Rack for more room. Then you need grow lights because the plants are too far from the window and then you start separating plants on their light requirements. We got to the stage where we had 3 Baker’s Racks in two different rooms with grow lights in both rooms. There were home made humidity trays on each shelf and we even hung many of them outside in the summer on chains suspended from the eaves of the house. Then we built a greenhouse and our space problems were solved, right? There were three 8 x 3 foot benches and two 14 foot hanging rods. It took us about 15 months to get to the point where we questioned the statement that “there is always room for one more orchid”. Well, we certainly weren’t going to stop buying orchids and you just don’t sell or give away your “children”, so we had a problem to solve.
I saw several pictures in the AOS Orchids magazine of grower’s greenhouses where they had constructed vertical wire walls or cylinders made of wire where you could hang orchids. So, I asked my husband to see if he couldn’t make something similar that we could use in our greenhouse to hang smaller orchids on.
 He uses pressure treated 2 x 2s as the frames and uses scraps of these for the corner braces. He uses screws to fasten the pieces together and then uses ½ inch mesh hardware cloth to cover one side of the frame. He made the frames the width of the benches and made them 42 inches high so we can easily reach the top to hang pots. He put screw eyes on the top of the frame and wires them to the supports for the hanging rods at the ceiling so they stand upright and are quite sturdy. They sit on the top of the bench and hardly take up any room so we really didn’t sacrifice any “plant space” and you can hang plants on both sides of the wall.
We have 5 Phrags and because they weren’t blooming, we decided that they had to be moved into more light. The problem was that we didn’t have space for them on our sunny bench. So, my husband built the second wire wall and put a shelf on this one 12 inches above the bench top. He covered the shelf with the ½ inch grid white plastic “egg crate” that we had been using on our humidity trays. He did this for stability and support under the pots but we got an unintended secondary benefit from it. Our Beallara’s and a couple of our Brassia hybrids were getting too much light on the bench as evidenced by them turning very yellowish. We moved them under the shelf where they are getting “mottled shade” and they are now the good light green color they should be.
Space will always be a problem for orchidists but we have found that these wire walls are a relatively simple and inexpensive way to increase our growing area. I’m sure this idea can be modified very easily to help solve other’s specific space problems.
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