Noah and Rob

Greenhouse Blog

Friday October 25th,

First day at the greenhouse. Today we spent the day with Jeff, Stacey, Mike, Sara and Carly. Jeff gave us the walkthrough of our weekend duties and greenhouse protocol. Once that was finished we started our list of duties. We tried to finish all the small/ short duties first so we could spend as much time as possible on the grasses over the next two days. We finished almost all the small duties and were able to start most of our other duties such as the blog, IPM assignment etc. Testing the pH of the cultivars was interesting. I found out the tester works with the cap on or off. 

Saturday October 25th,

After completing the morning checklist, we finished off the small tasks such as cleaning the pots and walking the crop, so we could spend the rest of our time dividing the (grasses). While inspecting the tropicals we noticed three of them had numerous spots of mealy bug, so we pulled them aside and wiped down all the foliage with the water/ alcohol solution. A couple of the poinsettia were wilted and all of them had dry media so we watered them ensuring all the emitters were functional. After turning the water on the sound of water spraying on the floor did not seem right, and we quickly noticed the furthest pipe on bench 8 had a leak. We immediately turned the individual line off and moved the several crop to different emitters on the same bench, as well as the wilted ones. The rest of our day was spent on crown division and planting the cuttings into cell packs as well as checking the Priva wick, temperatures, and cleaning up at the end of the day.

All in all it was a successful second day.

Sunday October 26th

Once the checklist was finished, we did a complete cleaning of the greenhouse because we wouldn’t be working in there all day. We also removed the potato slices we placed on various plants from Friday and noticed larva was still present in a few plants. We also placed a sticky card around each cultivar of poinsettia so monitor if the white fly were still active. We spent a large portion of our day dividing and planting the grasses. We turned roughly 100 grasses into 1000 after a long day of dividing.