Not sure how many of you know Hershell as he is a fairly new member but we have talked back and forth and last week he drove down from his home in Georgia to my place in Florida for a visit. Hershell is a commercial greenhouse builder by trade as well as a professional tree grafter, more on that later.
While he was here I had discussed that I wanted a greenhouse and picked his brain and he said get a big trailer and come on up, that he had extra parts from all the years of building and we could work out a discount. So yesterday my neighbor and I made the 3.5 hour trip up to Hershells place in GA.
The tour started out with him showing us his sugar shack, he grows sugar cane and processes it in to cane syrup....this is something this Florida conceived but yankee raised soul had never even heard of let alone tried. Amazing stuff....kind of like Agave nectar but much richer. My Florida native neighbor was in heaven, he said "why didn't you tell me he made cane syrup"? Think it was mostly because when he said he made cane syrup I had no idea what the heck he was talking about:) Hershell gave us 3 bottles each of the syrup and would not take a dime for it.
We picked a couple gallons of Celeste figs from his large tree which was just loaded with fruit.
Then the tours of the greenhouses, he has two 100 foot long 30' wide houses just packed with plants, mostly citrus. He also has 25 or so varieties of citrus outside, still not sure how he can do that in Georgia. I have never seen so many different and odd types of citrus in one place in my life and I have been to the University of Floridas citrus research station in Lake Alfred.
We then got busy loading greenhouse components. While Hershell had said he has extras I was still amazed when I saw it:) Building after building and all jam packed with goodies. These are commercial greenhouse components and the type built for schools, that sort of thing. Very heavy duty rectangular tubular steel. I ended up with a 17'x42 greenhouse that will be 12' tall at the peak. I need the height to accommodate the lychee trees and mango trees already in ground. Everything from the top arches to the posts, the screws, supports braces......heck even the ground cloth and all the irrigation equipment to run it..even the metal lath to make the tops for the tables. My neighbor even ended up getting a smaller greenhouse, a 10x20' as well.
Hershell lives not far from Moody airforce base and all day the A1 warthogs were flying over then doing live fire training.....just an incredible noise. The cannon it fires sounds like a long reverberating burp:) at least it did to me. Hershell said each burp was about 1000 rounds.
I forgot the grafting.....Hershell grafts trees for people on a commercial basis, just thousands of pecan trees a year. He gave us a demonstration......he went SLOWWWWWWW and it was still just a blur. Think they were whip grafts? They fit so perfectly together even doing them that fast that you could not see the line between the two pieces of wood....absolutely amazing.
It was a very enjoyable day and I can't thank Hershell enough for his friendship and generosity. His fig collection is amazing as well and in a short time I bet you he will have one of the best collections in this country judging by his citrus collection.