Friday June 7^th, 2013 –

Courtney Preszcator:

Well folks, after wrapping up our hard core week of prep for our A.M. MAC Cuddy Gardens Open House we finally made it to the big weekend! With over 600 people (ranging from all ages!) coming through for garden tours as well as our phenomenal plant sale we considered the weekend to be a GREAT success! Thank you all for coming out and supporting The Cuddy Gardens as well as the Horticulture Technician Program at Fanshawe College!

What does the end of prep for the Cuddy Gardens Open House mean? Time for us to all head back to the main Fanshawe Campus to work on our final touches before Grad! We are literally in the home stretch now. Time to beef up the plant beds and planters with some radical colour from our annuals grown here in the Spriet Family Greenhouse by our very own co-horts! (Other Hort Techs).

DMC and I headed up removing the Tulips from the Flagpole Plant Bed at the front of F Building just in front of the President’s Office and installed a new design which incorporated Elephant Ears (Colocasia), Coleus “The Line” (Solenostemon), Orange Marigolds (Colendula), and a pop of some White Gazanias....Hope you enjoy the view Dr. Rundle!

If you remember back to one of our very first weeks of work here at Fanshawe College we received a truckload full of 130 yards of mulch! That’s right, 130 yards of mulch! Well, we still needed more to freshen up the final garden beds around K Building, The Conifer Garden, The Woodland Garden, and around The Residences on campus. That meant another truckload of mulch (130 more yards!).

It’s been a very mentally and physically draining two weeks but the Cuddy Gardens Open House was well worth it and seeing all of the smiling faces on the Grads taking their family photos in front of our well-groomed gardens is the cherry on top of that “draining cake”!

On a side-note it was one of our awesome team members birthday, Eric “Arms” Abrams birthday! (He wore his present immediately!)

May 24, 2013 - Jaimi Uram

As this cold, wet week comes to an end, so too does our once gigantic mulch pile.  The team has been working hard in preparation for graduation, which is just three weeks away.  Weed, edge, mulch; Weed, edge, mulch.  And what do we get in reward for racing through the gigantic mulch pile?  Another gigantic mulch pile next week.  There is no time to slow down as we have completed just over half of the mulching to be done.

Some of the planters around the college were also completed this week.  Filled with soil on Tuesday, the annuals were planted on Wednesday and Thursday.  While most of the planters stuck to the red and white theme of Fanshawe, we did get to go wild with coloured annuals in a select few.

With the may long weekend and any sign of frost behind us, annual planting has begun.  The greenhouse is slowly emptying as the few companies, such as Clintar and The Western Fair, pick up their annual flower crop that Fanshawe supplies.  With the outgoing orders comes clean up and a lot of empty pots to be washed!   

We also got the pleasure of welcoming back our program coordinator and professor, Michael Pascoe, from his trip to Kenya and Dubai.  He brought along his famous dog BD to say hello.