Vegetal wall

Hello! i will try here to introduce my vegetal wall to you. I am french so please forgive my english, i am probably doing many mistakes.

I wanted to build a support allowing orchids to grow naturally as close as possible as to their wild condition. It had to be an automatic system freeing me from the watering drudgery.

The wall is 2m40x 0,70m, it reaches my roof.

I built everything from A to Z. Here is a basic smmary of the system:
- The main support is a vertical frame with a non-biodegradable fabric.
- their is a tank below, containing 100 to 200 L of water. An hydraulic pump bring the water to the top of the wall and let it fall on it, moistening the whole thing, and going back to the tank below. it's a closed loop.
- Plants are fixed on the support according to their size, water requirements, light requirements ect. They grow new roots going where they want: inside the wall, inside the moss, outside, according to the plants own way of growing.
- The water is manually controlled, it was hard to find the good recipe (osmosis water or tap water, fertilizer, Ph, kh, conductivity). Now after one year, it's not the water anymore that is rulling the wall settings, it's the wall himself that had a strong balance and that is changing the water settings when they differ from his own balance: Ph 5-6, conductivity 450-600.
- I learned a lot about the plants needs, especially about the huge calcium and bicabonartes consumption of plants.
- I had some failures, many trials, but now the good recipe is found, it's mainly sucess with growing and flowering.

Here are some steps and some pictures of flowers.

The species on the wall are:
- Angraecum (germynianum, scotianum, elephantinum, linearifolim, echlerianum, birrimense, mauritianum)
- Aerangis (kirkii, elisii, kotshyana, fuscata, articulata, fastuosa)
- Dendrobium (leucocyanum, subacaule)
- Stanhopea (napoensis)
- Masdevalia (caesia)
- Neobathiea (perrieri, grandidiera)
- CHristensionia (vietnamica)
- Renanthera (monachica)
- Coryanthes (macrantha)
- Barbosella (orbicularis, cogniauxiana)
- Bulbophyllm (many species, among them: moniliforme, polliculosum, tingabarinum, plumatum, lipan)
- Thrixspermum (centipeda)
- trisetella (triaristella)
- Restrepias (they haven't flowered yet and it's keiki)

 

and after a year the wall is completely covered with 13 differents mosses species, ferns and others

 

Thanks evrybody for all your nice comments. I am glad you find it nice.

It's a kinf of blanket used for covering the bottom of pools, it's called "aquanape" in french but i don't know what could be the equivalence in english. I fixed it as a double layer, hanging from the top of the wall. It retains enought water to stay moistened but not completly wet. The shallow layer dries faster, allowing orchids that don't like to be wet to get their roots healthy, while it keep the inner layer wetter, where orchids that like water have sent their roots.

Thank you very much! I first started this to help me growing orchids inside without being bothered with watering.

The humidity is kind of normal for a house, i do not measure it though. When the wall wasn't covered, it released some humidity in the air that was pretty unpleasant. But as soon as the mosses arrive and cover the blanket, their is no more problem: it even absords humidity, letting the atmosphere is my house totaly normal. It has no smell neither, but if you put your nose at 1cm of the wall, you can smell a very very mild smell looking like fresh musrhoom wich is pretty pleasant.

I seeded the water and the blanket with a lot of micro-organisms (symbiotics fungi, symbiotics bacterias, metabolizing bacterias) because i believe they provide an healthy medium to the orchids, even if i don't have formal prooves about it.

 

Thank you again! i am growing orchids for the simple pleasure and satisfaction it gives to me ^^. Maybe it could be worth selling the system but i don't have the time for it anyway! So i guess it will stay a private growing wall

here is how it looks like today: 3 of the 5 divisions of the bulbophyllum tingabarinum are blooming together, and the bulbophyllum lasiochillum is flowering too below them .