Fanshawe College Garden Weekend Duty

                During the weekend duty of September 23^rd – September 25^th many things were accomplished in the woodland garden. Which we consider our horticulture technician backyard. When we arrived on Friday morning at 8am Jeff took us around the Woodland Garden and explained everything that needed to be done within the area. We could have wrote a book with all the tasks. Together, my partner Liam and I decided what main priority was and what was not. We narrowed it down to deciding to maintain the left side large garden. We decided to choose this task as priority because it was the largest and needed the most work. We took the negative and turned it into a positive.

                To begin our much needed make over, we obviously started with the weeding as it was more of a weed bed than a flower bed. Weeding took all of Friday. After the weeding was done, with minutes to spare we decided to prune all the bed flowers off the large grouping of Redbeckia. The hot temperatures leads to watering. At 2pm on Friday I was sent out on the water tank and tractor to water the freshly planted Chrysanthemum’s (Garden Mums). The mums were planted by the summer students (Tawny and Jenn) in the front Oxford and Second Street entrance bed, along with the annual bed by the parking office. During our maintenance class on Wednesday, we were taught how to lay topsoil down and properly seed it for grass growth. On Friday I also had to water the seed to promote germination. Nearing to 5 o’clock I headed back to put the tractors away, while stopping to fill up with fuel. I got Liam to pick me up from C block to start tool clean up. We washed all our used tools from the day with steaming hot water, and headed back to the greenhouse to sign out.

                Saturday morning approached us quickly and we set out to start mulching. Mulching is hard and tedious work but we were up for the challenge. We did the circle check on the RTV 500 and drove to the tool room to get the tools we needed for the day. We then proceeded to drive down to C block to get the tractors and trailer. We set out to the mulch pile near the compound to begin to fill the trailer. After that we headed back up to the Woodland Garden to begin mulching until lunch time. Two trailer loads were required to mulch the bed. After lunch I went out on the water tanker again to water the 42 planters around campus. Almost completing them all in one day minus a few, I ended at 4 to begin putting tractors away. Putting the tractors away was very time consuming as the water tank and trailer have different balls to attach to, meaning I had to change them to put them both away. They had to go in accordingly, almost like a puzzle to fit the tractor with the backhoe on the back which is normally stationed at Cuddy Gardens as our other Kubota tractor is away getting fixed. As I was watering all day Liam finished mulching and began to weed the smaller middle bed.  We then headed for the greenhouse around 5 o’clock, signed out and headed home.

                As Sunday morning approached, we started our day similar to Saturday. Getting the circle check on the RTV 500 and picking out all the tools for the day. As the mulching was finished Saturday we began to finish weeding the smaller middle bed that was a disaster itself. The Spirea has ‘spiraled’ its way into the iris’s which needed to be cleaned up. Like explained above in our maintenance class with Tim we seeded some grass areas. The areas were then staked and had caution tape around them. Since being at a College, of course students overnight had broken the stakes and ripped down the tape. We then fixed the whole area until it looked good as new again. After our first break at 10:30 I went to C block to get the water tanker and finish watering the planters and hit the mum beds up again so they do not wilt. After lunch Liam and I did some of the little jobs around campus like filling up the fuel in the equipment, collecting the water tanker hose, and watering a planter that was not reachable with the tanker because of construction. Lastly we started tool clean up and that was that. Over all we had a very positive successful weekend, that was a huge learning curve. Maintaining gardens is harder than it looks but very satisfying in the end. I am very happy with the end result of our first maintenance weekend duty at the Fanshawe Gardens.