WEEKEND BLOG – February 3-5, 2017

By: Alison & Justin

Our weekend duty has been a lot of organizing and taking inventory within the Fanshawe greenhouse. On Friday morning we got started with our greenhouse check list. Watering, checking the temperatures, the humidity and opening the cash for Friday sales were some of the items on the list. Our program coordinator Michael Pascoe came into the greenhouse and asked us to make up succulent pots for the Plant Symposium coming up on Feb 17^th. For those of you that don’t know what that is, it is a horticulture event where people talk about flowers and plants. Justin and I had to make up 25 pots with around 4 succulents in them, with a decorative white stone on top. This task took most of Friday keeping the tags in line with the correct pot, and potting up certain succulents with others. These pots will enhance Fanshawe’s reputation - showing off all we have learned.

 After the succulent pots were complete we had 2 massive Aloe plants to re pot for the same horticulture show. We placed them into two decorative pots with the white decorative stone on top.

To end Friday off, we began to organize the 2 benches in the greenhouse for our sales shelf. Organizing included moving the 4 inch annual pots and keeping the same annuals together and then we had to keep the small succulents together. We decided to keep the variegated lavender scallops on the top shelf as they can be viewed from standing.

Saturday morning started out with the biggest job on our weekend duty. We had to go through all the stock baskets and organize them by their watering requirements. Each plant was tagged as green, yellow or red. Green means it likes water and needs a lot, yellow means it can be left a few days and still survive if it doesn’t get water for a day or so. Yellow also means it doesn’t like too much water or to be over watered. We have a very few plants categorized as red which means that they don’t like to be over watered and need to dried out in between watering. After researching each plant and typing out a label for it, we had organized them in the greenhouse on 3 benches by watering requirements. If there was more then one of the same plant, we had to make sure they were grouped together. The next step was to take pictures of each individual stock basket and upload them to a USB. Now for future reference we have information on all the plants we have in stock! Around lunch time, we went into the school to water the 3 tree Ficus in front of the book store and take off a few of the yellowing leaves. 

Next stop were the Spider plants in the hallway of M building to water.

 As yesterday was very sunny for a change, we walked the crop (Hydrangeas) around 3 and noticed the hydrangeas were very dry, even though they were watered in the morning so we decided to water them. Then to end Saturday night off we did a bit of cleaning in the greenhouse and potting room.

Sunday morning started off very cold and snowy which is a big change from Saturday. As we did our morning check list and walked the crop, we noticed the hydrangeas were still very moist from our late watering Saturday evening, so we chose not to water the crop this morning except for then the seed flats, poinsettias, and annuals that needed it. After walking the crop and watering, our next task on the list was to pot up 50 geranium cuttings. The perennial geraniums were dug out of the ground from the campus beds in the summer. We were to cut them off and get a good root systems and put 2-3 in a pot. We propagate these because instead of spending money on new ones, why wouldn’t you use the ones you already have. It’s the smart way to garden!! After the geraniums were done, we transplanted 4 pack annuals into 4” pots, and put these out into greenhouse. We did our second crop walk around 1 o’clock and made the decision to water the hydrangeas. In our greenhouse class on Wednesday morning we were instructed to do an aluminium sulfate drench to the Blue hydrangeas. The drench will change the pH in the plant which will help make the flower to come out as a purer blue. However, the scale we used to measure the correct amount of aluminum sulfate was out of whack and it was too far gone before we could change anything. Our duty over the weekend was to monitor the Blue hydrangeas’ pH and E.C. readings. We also decided to water the Blue hydrangeas with the watering can since it will flush the plant out better rather than the emitters. All in all, good weekend in the Fanshawe greenhouse!