"Geir Harris Hedemark" wrote in message
...
(J. Del Col) writes:
The fermentation in this case is a dry --well, moist-- process that
takes months and requires tropical heat and sunlight.

Home production of vanilla "beans" is wholly impractical unless one
lives in the tropics.

You are saying this to someone who is growing tropical orchids in a
place that is almost north of the polar circle.

Sounds to me like an excuse to borrow the temperature chamber from work.


This reminds me of a discussion I had with a lady recently, who was saying
that it isn't practicable for home owners to have their own vegetable
gardens when you're as far north as the north shore of Lake Superior. I
just had to point out that I knew a family in Churchill Manitoba (which is
MUCH further north) who made their own greenhouse, and grew their own
vegetables. The structure seemed rather flimsy, and a polar bear would not
have any trouble ripping the walls apart to get to the tasty morsels inside,
but they were growing a wide variety of things ranging from potatoes to
flowers. The moment someone tells me that something is impossible or
impacticable, I tend to get motivated to find a way to do it in a cost
effective manner. That is, I won't settle for showing that it is possible
to grow a given plant in a given locality, I'd go a step further to show
that it is less expensive for me to do it myself than it is to rely on some
other means (in the case of food stuffs, the alternative is to buy directly
or indirectly from a distant supplier). After all, the principal reason
most of us can enjoy our own orchids is that some genius figured out how to
grow and propagate them in large numbers outside their natural distribution.
One factor providing impetus for technological change is a desire to do what
is presently difficult, impractical or impossible with existing
technologies.

Cheers,

Ted

BTW: instead of borrowing the temperature chamber, why not make your own?