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For orchid growers, greenhouses are a must
by Jill Gleeson
It’s an overcast, gray day, with a few stray snowflakes swirling in the chill wind slicing through central Pennsylvania — until you step through this door in Centre Hall.
CDT/Nabil K. Mark
A cattleya orchid in Kit Hume's greenhouse. Kit Hume has two geodesic dome greenhouses at the State College home. One is 33 feet in diameter and is used solely for orchids and the other is 42 feet and used for her other plants. CDT/Nabil K. Mark
In John and Shirley Dunkelberger’s greenhouse, it’s always spring, or maybe winter in the tropics. Temperatures hovering somewhere in the 60s offer a gentle warmth for the hundreds of potted orchids of all shapes, sizes and kinds that fill the greenhouse from front to back, side to side.
Some are in bloom, revealing petals in nearly every color imaginable. Most offer only glinting green leaves — a glorious enough sight on a dreary winter day.
For serious gardeners, the benefits of a greenhouse — fresh, homegrown vegetables in winter, glorious flowers while vegetation outside slumbers — are simply too seductive to be dismissed.
But perhaps the most dedicated local greenhouse devotees belong to a unique subset of green-thumbed hobbyists: the Central Pennsylvania Orchid Society. Still going strong after 45 years, the society boasts about 60 members, about 15 of whom have greenhouses. The reason is simple: to grow large numbers of orchids in a winter climate, you need a greenhouse.
“Greenhouses are the only way to provide the humidity orchids want,” said John Dunkelberger, 73.
“Unless,” adds his wife, Shirley, “you want to rot your windowsills!”
The Dunkelbergers have two 14-by-25-foot greenhouses. They are hoopstyle and constructed of tubular metal frames that are anchored in concrete block foundation walls and overlaid with two layers of clear plastic.
They’ve had the orchid greenhouse for 40 years. In the 1990s, John took his hobby to a new level and began breeding orchids. It’s a process that requires patience, as it can take upwards of six years before a single bloom is produced. John specializes in oncidium alliance orchids, frequently characterized by slender branching sprays of small flowers, and cymbidium orchids, prized for their showy sprays of large flowers.
The Dunkelbergers’ orchid greenhouse features a thermostat-controlled heating system, which burns about 450 gallons of heating oil annually, and a vent fan. At night, John keeps the temperature between 55 and 60 degrees; and he always raises the temperature a bit after he waters, to help prevent mold and fungus.
John waters or mists his orchids almost daily, using rainwater that drains from a downspout into a tank — the groundwater to the house is too hard, he says.
Though the Dunkelbergers’ ardor for orchids drives them, their greenhouses provide other pleasures.
“I get depressed if we get too much cloudy weather,” John says, “but I can go into the greenhouse and pretend it’s summer.”
Just a few miles from the Dunkelbergers lives Mary Carol Frier, also a member of the Orchid Society. Her home, which she shares with her husband, Don, and daughter Mineka, is built on a hill with a stunning view of Seven Mountains. Tucked into a corner, just off the living room, is Mary Carol’s greenhouse.
When the Friers built the home in July of 2006, there was never any doubt that Mary Carol would have a greenhouse. The 59-year-old, now a Penn State graduate student studying agronomy, is a former commercial orchid grower.
“I enjoy working with the orchids,” Mary Carol says. “Part of it is that they are a horticultural challenge. Their beauty and diversity attract a competitive horticulturalist into orchid madness, which is growing more, growing better and growing wiser.”
Mary Carol’s greenhouse is roughly 13 by 22 feet. The roof is slanted and soars to 20 feet at its highest point. It is constructed of double-glazed glass, with Low-E glass on the western side of the roof, which helps, explains Mary Carol, to both “cut down on the orchids’ exposure to the ultraviolet light that may burn them, and retard heat loss from the greenhouse at night.”
Like the Dunkelbergers, she has a thermostat controlled heating and venting system, although her heat is geothermal.
There are about 40 orchids in the greenhouse, including the lovely Phalaenopsis, sometimes called moth orchids for their resemblance to moths in flight. There are also a number of zygo cacti lining a shelf, a jasmine vine and small fig, lemon, palm and coffee trees.
Tall, leafy banana trees, planted to help shade the orchids, add to the tropical feel.
“It’s very pleasant,” Mary Carol says, glancing around the space. “It’s nice just to sit in the lawn chair, put some sun block on and soak it up.”
“No one except a real nut case is going to invest this much in a greenhouse,” declares Kit Hume. She isn’t sure how much she’s spent getting her domed greenhouses built — they were built at the same time as her house, so she doesn’t have a separate figure — but she knows it wasn’t cheap.
“But it’s great fun to come down here,” she says, “and play with the orchids and talk to them and stake them up.”
Kit, 62, is the Edwin Erle Sparks professor of English at Penn State. She lives in the house she and her husband, Rob Hume, the university’s Evan Pugh professor of English, recently built in Patton Township. She has two domed greenhouses: one, for her orchids, is 33 feet across and the other, for vegetables, is 42 feet wide. The frames are wood, with triple-pane polycarbonate on both sides. They are heated by LP gas heaters and cooled by automatic vents and fans.
Still, “in hot, sunny weather, they overheat,” Kit says. “I’ve planted some quick-growing locusts to the south of the orchid dome in hopes that shade will help in a few years.”
To cut down on waterborne mineral salts, Kit, who is also an Orchid Society member, uses reverse osmosis water for her orchids; in the garden dome she has a rainwater collection system. The water storage tanks in the domes help provide humidity; she also uses misters in the orchid greenhouse.
She calls her greenhouses “experimental,” but what she is doing seems to be working. Her orchid domes boast 280 of the plants, including graceful slipper, moth and butterfly orchids. In her garden greenhouse, Kit is growing various lettuces, tomatoes and snow peas and a wide variety of fruit trees. There is a walkway that winds around the vegetation, which is planted directly into topsoil.
The smell is rich and loamy, all the more pleasant to encounter on a drab winter day.
If Kit’s passion is reserved for her orchids, she is not displeased with the other wintertime benefits of her greenhouse.
“We make a wonderful grape tomato salad,” she said. “We’ve been eating tomatoes coming out of the ears.”
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