Courtney and Katlyn's greenhouse blog - October 4-6, 2013


We started our 3 day greenhouse practical on a very gloomy Friday morning. We needed to start off our morning by going through a greenhouse opening checklist (checking the facilities and all of the plants). After finishing up the checklist we went in to pull back the shade curtains. At this point we have started the short days and longer nights with the Poinsettia crop. It’s crucial so keep on a very routine regiment with the shade curtains so we made sure to watch and make sure the top curtains were opening correctly as well. With the set-up of the greenhouse and having the tall tropical plants inside it was quite tricky maneuvering around them as well as the fragile Poinsettias to reach the curtain hoops. Having a tall friend can be quite handy in this situation! After finishing up the shade curtains we moved on to our next duty which was re-potting some colocasia, purple tree aeonium, pineapple palm, as well as our Wollemia nobilis (Wollemia Pine). This took us some time as we needed to transfer all of the potted up colocasia from the compound into bulb crates. We labeled each crate and moved on. When potting up the purple tree aeonium we needed to stake it for support (it was quite top heavy!). It’s quite interesting how the Pineapple Palms stem actually resembles the fruit pineapple. Katlyn took on walking through the Poinsettia crop to ensure that all pots had drip-lines in them and that each plant looked healthy. While walking through she noticed there was one plant in particular that had been infected with a familiar virus. Hopefully this isn’t a bad sign! Katlyn removed the infected plant and quarantined it so that it would not infect the rest of the crop. A few plants required hand watering but once this was finished up we found it was time to clean. We washed up the pots and cleaned off all areas we had used. Disinfecting as we went along.

We came in to work Saturday morning hoping for some sunshine and nicer weather. Another gloomy day awaited us unfortunately! We drank our morning timmies and headed in to the tractor bay. We were going out in the Rtv to collect all of the Canna Lilys from around campus. We needed to label them and store them in bulb crates in our outdoor compound. We had no idea how many Cannas awaited us on campus and most of them surrounded the greenhouse. To fit all of the Cannas into the compound we needed to move a lot of the plants around in the compound and still found it was a tight fit! We were able to locate a few tags for the plants we removed and kept them with those specific plants.


Sunday was a day all about house keeping and cleaning! This may seem like a tedious job to many but to us hort techs we know that a clean greenhouse will lead to a healthy crop. You never want to have any plant debris or old media on the ground. This meant washing down the entire greenhouse floor, the potting room floor as well as the tractor bay floor. We removed the drains from inside the greenhouse and gave them a good washing to make sure there were no remnants of debris. The drains were surprisingly heavy! We switched out the IPM sticky traps while we were cleaning in the greenhouse. We substituted between the colours yellow and blue because certain bugs had adapted to certain coloured traps. We found the traps just kept trying to stick to us! Our last task was putting up some double sided velcro to close the curtains in areas where it was hard to reach (around drip lines and piping). We closed the shade curtains and took one last walk around the greenhouse before closing up and heading home for the evening. It was a long weekend but we had made it!