Weekend Duty Blog - February 17-19, 2017

Lexi Drenth & Scott Pollock

            During our weekend duty, we learned a lot and did quite a bit. We will be going over what we did on each day, including when we opened and closed and a bit about the field trip on Friday.

            On Friday, both Scott and Lexi participated in the field trip to Landscape Ontario’s Plant Symposium at the Best Western Lamplighter Inn in London. During our breaks, we walked around and looked at all the ponds by the pool. We were looking at some plants that we just learned about in our Plant ID class a couple of weeks prior. At lunch, we discussed about leaving the field trip early to go back to the greenhouse and start our work early. We had a couple hours head start potting up the Supertunia plugs. After we put away our stuff, we didn’t do an efficient clean because we knew we were coming back tomorrow and making the same mess.

            On Saturday morning, we arrived at 7:45am and signed in and started thinking about how we were going to get through all the work within the next two days. After we walked the crop, we put our four sticky cards out throughout the crop. We started with going through the crop in the greenhouse to look for dry spots and/or imperfections with the crop, like wilting or broken leaves. We fertilized the hydrangea crop right in the morning so then we could test the EC and pH levels, but after we set up eight plants, we realized that we did not get our professors to get the deionized water out of the chemical storage closet before they left on Friday.  We called our supervisor for advice and realized we could not do it so we could not partake in doing these tests. We moved past that and we had all the Supertunia plugs to pot up in the four-inch pots. 

We made up a total of 605 pots with one plug in each and separated into trays based on their colours. We had ordered red and white, all based on Canada’s 150th Anniversary this summer. We were going through so much potting mix that we had to make up two extra bags of pro-mix. It took us up to lunchtime to finish and organize them. After lunch, Lexi potted up some orange chrysanthemum pots as Scott put the Pretoria Canna Lillies in the pots half deep. As Scott did that, Lexi was making up tags for each of the pots.

 As soon as they were done, Lexi put all the information on the sheets of papers on the seed fridge. We took a walk to the library with the watering jug, there are three plants in the back that were dry. We finished the day off by filling out our paperwork, starting with the IPM sheet and the PRIVA sheets.

            When we opened up on Sunday, we started by walking the crop again to check for dry spots and remove any debris. When we were done with that, Lexi started to clean the potting room and Scott worked in the greenhouse and cleaned the outside storage space. Before Lexi started cleaning the potting room, she pinched the Tradescantia in the four-inch pots. We spent most of the morning cleaning. Scott squeegeed the floors in the greenhouse after he watered some of the plants. He squeegeed the floors into the floor drains, after he completely wiped down the floors, swept and made sure all the hoses were rolled up properly and to make sure it looked organized. As Scott was doing that, Lexi was cleaning the potting room, she was cleaning every crack and crevice. She organized everything so well; it looked like a completely new room. 

After we had lunch, we took the water tank and two ladders and we started dusting the leaves on the three ficus trees in front of the bookstore. Lexi was wiping them down with a soap and water mix and Scott was using a leaf shine liquid. We spent our time doing them, we made sure that the leaves that were showing were really clean but we tried to get the really tall ones and the ones deep in the trees. We didn’t want to spend a ton of time each of the trees but we did spend a couple hours doing all of them.

At the end of the day, we spent the rest of the day finishing the PRIVA sheets, IPM sheets and uploading the pictures onto the computer.

        

        By the end of our weekend duty, we learned a couple things about the humidity levels in the greenhouse. We learned that whenever we have a question no matter how small or big but we have to be willing to ask the question. There were a couple points of the weekend that we had to call our supervisors for the answers, which is what they are there for. It is very risky putting students in charge of a whole greenhouse for a couple days, but it is a very good learning experience for us all to do a weekend now and then.