Weekend Duty Blog – Oct 14, 15, 16

Amadeo and Jin

Friday – The beginning of Friday’s duty period started at 2:00 pm due to the CLT test in the morning. When we got to the greenhouse after the CLT test we began with an orientation meeting with both the greenhouse crew and maintenance crew and went over the expectations and basic information we will need to work effectively and safely during our work duty. After the meeting the greenhouse crew went to work while the maintenance crew went on a walk around the conifer garden with Greenhouse technician Jeff Rowley to go over what needs to be done over the weekend. We were tasked to mulch the last remaining beds and do cleanup around the cedar garden. With the little time we had left on Friday, we got straight to work. We grabbed the tractor and started to mulch the beds. We managed to get a full trailer down before the end of the day, although we did not cover a lot of ground because of the standard rule of 3+ inches of mulch it did get us ahead for the next days to come.

As you can see in the photo we got about half of that bed done in the 2 1/2 to 3 hours we had left on Friday. 

Saturday – Saturday started off with a nice temperature of 3 C, we suited up grabbed the Kubota, some tools and headed out to C building to pick up the tractor and trailer to start mulching. It took about an hour to start officially working in the gardens, considering we had to go out to the mulch pile towards to the soccer field it can take some time to get ready. We headed back to the conifer garden, backed the trailer in to position and immediately started to make up for lost time in the morning. We started farthest from our entry point and moved towards it. We had a great work rhythm that we figured out, I filled a wheel barrow with mulch then Jin would spread it into place and we continued it for the rest of the duty period. We were like moving machines in constant motion there wasn’t a moment when we were not hauling or moving mulch into place, other than our breaks which we had to take. That day we emptied about 3 full trailers worth of mulch, to me that is a lot of mulch in a short amount of time. We managed to finish the beds around the deck to H cafeteria, and the one out of the two huge beds. We were lucky we finished half of one of the large beds on Friday, as it got us ahead for Sundays work. We ended the day with washing the tools, driving the tractor back to C building and prepared ourselves for Sundays work. See a glimpse of the finished product for Saturday below.

Sunday – Sunday was the finishing day of the maintenance weekend duty, the morning started off the same as Saturday, we grabbed our tools, Kubota and tractors and headed to the mulch pile to finish of the last 2 beds in the conifer garden. The three images show a before shot of what we had to do as well as what we had to clean up.

There was not a lot to do, at least not compared to what we were doing on Saturday. We started with the bed we already started on Friday and Saturday. We spread out the soil that was piled into the bed and got to work right away. To make sure I did not make a large mess on the grass with mulch, I (Amadeo) backed the trailing so it over hanged the bed and so when I pitch forked mulch into the wheel barrow, any that fell would simply fall into the bed itself. Since the bucket of the tractor was partly on the walking path I made extra precaution using cones to re-direct and made sure pedestrians could not get harmed passing through. The way I positioned the trailer made it very easy to hand bomb and dump the remaining mulch into the bed, we then spread it around and the finished product looked like this.

We made sure that we had tree wells around the conifers in the bed to prevent damage to the tree. Once that bed was finished we focused on cleanup, I (Amadeo) grabbed a backpack blower while Jin was raking up large piles that accumulated around the patio area and picking them up. I (Amadeo) blew all the cart paths, as well as the deck area around K building, moved onto the fountain area and then blew mulch back into beds that fell from transportation. After that it started raining right after we got another load of mulch to finish the last bed that is located next to the door to H building. This bed was the easiest and smallest out of them all and it took a little more than half a trailer load, we managed to finish it in the pouring rain in about 40 minutes. The image below is the finished product. It was a successful 3 days, and completed all the major tasks on the list.