Greenhouse Practical, September 13th 2013 Eric Abram Dave Comfort

We roused ourselves from sleep and made our way to the greenhouse on a chilly windy day, initially a welcome break from the incredible heat wave earlier in the week. However, the first job of the weekend was to pull up the chrysanthemums in order to plant them in a few strategically located planters on campus. This meant we would be working outside for the lion’s share of the day. I watered the mums in preparation for planting before packing the back of the RTV with all the tools we would need, as Dave walked the campus and marked the planters we would be using so our comrade Jessica Shields working her maintenance practical wouldn’t water them before we planted.

Driving around in the open RTV proved quite uncomfortable in the wind, especially for poor Dave who started suffering allergies on top of a nasty cold, but he was a trooper and we were able to complete 13 planters each with three 3-gallon pots. We raised Jess on the radio to let her know she could finish her watering and drove back to the greenhouse to tackle our next task: crating the Cannas and Pennisetum that we had obtained from Clintar. To store the rhizomes we needed to line some bulb crates with newspaper, so I picked up a stack of the Interrobang, not realizing the issue featured an interview with yours truly! 

Taking pictures of the leaves before trimming and carefully labelling the crates with image file numbers so they could be properly identified later, we dragged all the crates into the tractor bay as the weather forecast predicted a chance of frost before closing up the greenhouse for the day. The next morning we made an unhappy discovery upon reaching the greenhouse: one of the 1-gallon mum pots had been stolen in the night! Not the best start to our day. After completing the opening checklist we moved on to the ferns, also courtesy of Clintar. The ferns were to be divided into quarters and potted up in 6” rounds to grow in the greenhouse, and the overgrown ferns had incredibly tough root balls taking up the pots completely. Luckily, earlier just this week Dave and myself had purchased Hori-Hori knives, essential tools for any perennial gardener. We were able to make short work of the ferns, sawing through and cutting them down to size with ease before potting them up.

We started printing up tags for the annual hanging basket collected at Cuddy’s before realizing there were quite a few misplaced or inaccurate tags. Dave started the painstaking task of matching everything up and checking the spreadsheet to ensure every plant was correctly identified and tagged while I set sprinklers running in the Conifer Garden and pulled the crates out of the tractor bay back outside and watered them down for them to begin drying. Coming back inside I helped Dave as we retagged the annual hanging baskets, a job that was very necessary but quite a headache and took him most of the day to complete. 

The poinsettias were fertilized and watered and the irrigation through the entire crop was carefully inspected for leads hanging out of baskets, spaghetti strands pulled loose by the rolling benches, and water running off leaves instead of into pots. After a thorough watering the irrigation was turned off and the greenhouse lines were purged of fertilizer. I started installing hardware in order to hang the greenhouse wands and brooms off the floor before we closed up shop for the day.

We opened up our final day with Dave cleaning out and sterilizing the misting chamber while I completed installing the hooks to hang the brooms and squeegees on. Afterwards we began our largest job of the weekend: cleaning the greenhouse, top to bottom. As I swept and cleaned outdoor storage and the tractor bay, Dave began the unenviable task of cleaning the ceiling of the greenhouse. To accomplish this he had brought an extendable handle from home to which he tied a wet rag. Necessity as they say is the mother of invention:

Once this was done, we set about our final run-through of the greenhouse, cleaning the floors and emptying the drain grates, wiping off benches and tables, vacuuming everywhere, cleaning down the RTV, and making sure everything was in tip-top shape. Time to get ready for our maintenance practical next weekend! Eric