Our first full week taking care of the poinsettia crop began this Monday, with the finicky desert plants needing some extra care to ensure they stay in the goldilocks zone: not too much water (which risks crown rot), and not too little or else the small fellows will quickly dry out and perish. This meant going through and spot-watering each morning to make sure they all dried at roughly the same rate. Finally on Thursday the crop was in a consistent state and we were able to completely soak them again. The mums growing pot-in-pot received their final pinch and a dose of slow-release fertilizer this week.
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| Hilary adds tags to the new crop |
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| Teucrium chamaedrys 'Summer Sunshine' beginning to bloom in the dwarf conifer garden |
There was a lot of work to be done outside this week, as two soccer fields required new soil, seed, and sod, and the Carolinian garden and berm of the North parking lot required removal of several stumps, dead trees, and a large number of interfering branches and woody weeds. The pickaxe, chainsaw, and hand saws were all in use at various points; none could stand in the path of the mighty hort techs!
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| Darcy and DMC: 1. Dead cedar: 0 |
With the paucity of rain the past few weeks the water tanker has proved a life-saver for many of the trees and planters on campus and we have it out every day possible; but, as with every new piece of equipment, it too has its quirks. Sometimes it seems like a bit of a trickster, with a mysterious problem cropping up only to disappear moments later. Hopefully it will warm up to us soon and start taking it easy on us poor gardeners.
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| Good luck DMC! |
That's all from us this time as we head into the final week of July and our final four weeks as summer gardeners! The summer is flying by and in too short a time it will be autumn again. We'll all miss the blooms, but probably not the bugs.
-Eric Abram
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