Several months ago Jess and I went down to Walt Disney World using the passes I bought at the beginning of the year and spent the day at Epcot, the best Disney park EVER. The fireworks, the culture, figment…. it’s just COOL!

Disney runs a hydroponics facility at Epcot (in The Land) that they use to provide food for some of the restaurants in the park. There is a behind the scenes tour you can take where they go a little more in-depth on some of the methods they use to grow the plants, and at the end they’ll give you a little paper that explains how you can set up your own mini-hydroponics at home. Unfortunately when I moved I lost my copy.

After a few months of looking through various boxes and stacks of papers that I still need to deal with in my apartment I gave up on finding it. I guess a bear ate it or something. I figured perhaps Disney might be able to send me another one, so I filled out the little ‘contact us’ form they have on their web page. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t really expecting a reply. However, I saw this in my inbox this morning.

Thank you for your interest in Disney’s Horticulture at the Walt Disney World Resort. We are always pleased when a guest takes special interest in our landscapes. I have enclosed a few pieces of information for your reference. Hydroponics is a really neat system of growing different crops-and The Land at Epcot is a great example of what hydroponics is all about. Basil, beans, broccoli, mint, peppers, strawberries, and tomatoes are all plants commonly grown hydroponically.

In addition to the enclosed information, you may want to check out the websites listed below (these websites are not endorsed by Walt Disney World(r)).
www.howtohydroponics.com
www.growingedge.com

I hope this information is helpful to you. Please feel free to contact me at the phone number or e-mail address listed below if you have any other questions about Disney’s Horticulture.

Happy Gardening!

WDW Disney Gardener
(phone and email snipped)

Attached to the email was a PDF copy of the original paper I had misplaced.

How completely awesome is that?

Our target this time? The Magic Kingdom.

This is probably gonna be a somewhat long post, so click the link below for more!

So! We got up about 8:00 or so and hit the highway to Disney, after a quick breakfast at McDonalds. We wound up getting to the park about noon, so we decided to take care of the important stuff first.

Lunch!

After a fairly yummy panini at Pinocchio’s Village Haus, we decided to head on over to Pirates of the Carribean, since we both wanted to see the changes that had been made in the ride to tie it in with the movie. Honestly, I was both happy and disappointed with it. They added a very cool intro with Davey Jones, and there were some very realistic looking Jack Sparrow animatronic figures added to the ride, but the way they went about it just seemed kinda lackluster to me. All Disney attractions, from Space Mountain to the Haunted Mansion, tell a story. With Pirates the story is about an invasion, pillaging, and burning of a town, and the additions that Disney made just… don’t flow with it. You see the pirates looking for Jack Sparrow, you see all the old animatronics that tell the old story, then at the end you see Jack Sparrow sitting in the treasure room, singing. They could have done a much better job.

Also, the dude who used flash photography through the entire ride was about to get smacked in the back of the head.

One of the other attractions that had been recently reworked that I was looking forward to seeing was the Haunted Mansion. I think that Disney did a far better job with this one, both in the amount of the reworking as well as making it flow with the existing animatronics. They did some neat things like changing the head in the crystal ball to be a head in a floating crystal ball (I seriously need to find out how they did that.), as well as adding an Escher-esque room with footprints tromping up and down glowing staircases. The attic was also completely reworked; there is an entirely new bride animatronic that speaks to the guests, holding a gleaming axe and not at all hiding the fact that she killed her husband. I kinda miss the old bride, but the new one definitely looks far better.

I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, but the Timekeeper attraction in Tomorrowland was finally removed. Sadness!

But holy crap. The attraction that replaced it is almost worth the loss. It’s called the Monster Laugh Floor, featuring some of the cast from the movie Monsters, Inc., and it’s simply amazing. The audience comes in for a comedy show, with the comedians being animated monsters on a screen on the front – but the voice acting is all done live, so the comedians can interact with (and tease) audience members. It was absolutely amazing.

We finished out the day with a trip to Space Mountain – or rather, a wait in line while we waited for them to fix Space Mountain. Still, it’s an awesome roller coaster, and well worth the wait.

Three parks down, one more to go!