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I am Mr. White
and I am the greenhouse manager.
This is the Radford University
biology department
greenhouse.
And
what do we do in a greenhouse? We grow plants.
And our greenhouse has three different rooms.
We can control the temperature
and the humidity and
all those kinds of things and sometimes the lighting
in each of the rooms. So we can have
certain plants in certain rooms and we can make the conditions just right for them.
This is our first room of our greenhouse.
This is our fern room. As you noticed when you walk through the greenhouse
the temperatures are going to kind of change
and that's just because different plants like different temperatures.
So in here you notice it's a little bit cooler, a little more humid, a little more sticky.
We try to do that so these guys are happy.
We've got our caterpillar fern here and if you look
at the little things growing out of here, the little eyeball on them kind of resembles a
caterpillar, right?
If you stand right here it kind of looks like a moose.
Exactly. That's what it's called.
It's called a staghorn fern.
So a bunch of people have deer antlers hanging up above their door but that
wouldn't look cool in a greenhouse. So we have a plant that looks like it.
All right, let's move on to the next room and as you walk in just be real careful of
the bog sitting there in the middle.
All of these plants here they live in kind of an acidic soil, not really good
for nutrients. The soil's kind of squishy. It's not
favorable for the plants. They can't get a lot of food out of it.
So all of these plants that came up with adaptations to get their nutrients
somewhere else.
So all of these plants are carnivorous. Do you guys know what that means?
They eat meat.
These are called pitcher plants
and they have a really
neat way of attracting flies. They produce a little slippery nectar
or any kind of
bug really.
So the bug comes over here and says oh well that tastes good. I am going
to go drink some of this nectar and it falls in.
Everybody's favorite the Venus flytrap
and these are about as big as you'll see them. They really don't get this big and eat
people like you see in movies.
This is our cactus bench. Just be really careful as you walk by it. Don't brush up
against the any of them. Don't touch them.
We have this guy right here. It's our ponderosa lemon trees.
These lemon get really big. If you all want to pass this around
and a lot of your stir fry or your Chinese food, there's ginger in it
and the ginger is actually produced from this plant. But these
things up here
they're just showy. That's not where you get the ginger actually if you want ginger
you would dig this up and use the roots.
All right so this is our tropical room. If you'll notice when you go in here it got
a little warmer.
Did you guys feel that?
So these these plants like add a little warmer so you know in the first room
it was kind of cold, kind of muggy, and then in this room it's really hot and stuffy.
So as you guys come this way, you'll see this big, pretty flower, real showy petals and
I bet a lot of you are thinking wow that's a really pretty flower. I bet its smells
really good.
So if you lean down and you take a big whiff of it you realize,
ew, this smells really bad. It smells like something is rotting.
It smells like rotting meat.
As you all come this way you'll see our big tropical pit.
So that's where we keep all of our really tall grown plants cause in the
tropical rainforest they like to get really high. So we have to have somewhere where they
can get really high. So we have to put them down further.
All right well I think that's going to end our greenhouse tour. You guys learned a lot about plants.