Australian and New Zealand Gardening: BROMELIADS FOR NOVICES & ADDICTS APRIL 2012, 1 by perke_patch

perke_patch wrote:
Myac my hubby climbs as high up the tree as the ladder will allow and uses U nails to attach broms to the tree branches. I've attached a pic of the tree closest to the back verandah. we have mini neos, tillandsias, vriseas and aechmeas in trees. Everyone comments about how the colours make the tree look so good. So give it a go. If you can attach them to the coconut tree I'm sure it will work so well and the result will be so rewarding for you.

Tash I'm sure we all have our tales of disasters and losses. For us it was when we first started collecting seriously and had started paying bigger $$$ for some and wanted to display them the best way we could. Johnny developed some paths and raised gardens and then covered the lot with shadecloth structure. Unfortunately it was made of timber and looked so good. All went well for about 3 or 4 months and they looked so so good then we got weeks of heavy rain. When our plnts started dying we didn't know what was wrong till a seasoned grower asked the question "what did you build the shade structure out of?" That was how we learned about copper poisoning from treated timber. We cleaned them all out and tried to save them but lost quite a few of the more expensive ones. We probably felt like giving up and I'm sure we didn't pay big $$$ for any more till we were sure we weren't going to kill them. Of course we removed the timber and replaced with pipe but kept the coppers logs for uprights. Just remember that you won't make that mistake again so it's OK to keep collecting.