Weekend Duty Blog

March 10th, 11th, and 12th 2017

Amadeo and Soyoung

Friday

Friday started off with Jeff showing us around and answering any questions we needed for the weekend to come. We’ve done this before and it was mostly the same type of tasks except different crops. We put out the sticky cards as the first priority to monitor any pests that may be lurking in the crop. Our first job was walking the crop, we started at one end and working our way out. It was the Petunias and Elephant ears that were first, we put the fertilizer through the Dosatron and got started, there were not many that needed water but it was a good idea to check. After those it was the hanging baskets, 4” pots and everything else (excluding the hydrangeas). We were making sure to keep switching over the fertilizer’s using the Dosatron. Lastly we walked and spot watered the Hydrangea crop, the white Hydrangeas were coming in very full, with the pinks and blues trailing behind with only a few blossoming. Our time spent in the greenhouse passed and we moved onto our second task which was cleaning out the germination chamber. We took out all the cuttings and the metal plates that hold the trays elevated and scrubbed everything to get all the green moss/mould/algae off. It was a task that needed our noses plugged, but we pushed through and got it spotless.

 The chamber was spotless and smelling better. The next task we were told to do was to clean out and remove the soil from the Elephant ear bulb crates. There were 5-6 bulb crates and we took out all the soil in each and cleaned up the bulbs themselves and put them into a single crate. In between our jobs we had a few customers come in and buy some Hydrangeas. We then began to transplant some cuttings into 4” pots. We managed to get 1 full tray of transplants. Towards the end of the day we checked on the crop once more and then closed the till for the end of the day. The last hour was cleaning the potting room from the mess we made from our previous job, then locked up and ended our first day of weekend duty.


Saturday

Saturday started off the same as Friday, we walked the crop and checked for any dryness in the crops. Everything seemed okay and we spot watered what we had to. Our first major task was to update and add to the plant cutting, 4” pot and hanging basket list. We first counted all the cuttings to see if they were the right number and updated the number if need be. The 4” pots were counted and updated as well then we had to make any cuttings we could off of the hanging baskets if it wasn’t on the list already. We managed to get a good number of cuttings off of the hanging baskets we picked out

 The large planters in front of the bookstore were next on the list so we took the Aquamate out there and started off by picking out any Tulips that were dead and pruning out dead foliage in the planters. We watered each planter and worked on dusting off the leaves in the canopy. We were using a plant leaf cleaner and wiping off with rags, it was surprising how dusty the plant was. Some basic pruning on the tree by cutting out some half dead limbs to give it a cleaner look. Back to the greenhouse again we went to go look at the crop and since the sun was out a bit it heated up the greenhouse enough to dry out some of the hydrangeas and we noticed some started to droop. We quickly added water to the ones that looked wilted and checked the rest. They were back up and looking lively by the end of the day

About 30 minutes before closing down the cash register our first customer came in and snagged a white Hydrangea and were quickly on their way. After closing up the cash and bringing in the signs we cleaned the floors and washed some of the pots we used and locked up.


Sunday

It was our final day in the greenhouse and we started it like usual with a crop walk and spot water. The Hydrangeas were looking nice today and we saw a few more blooms and colours coming out. We took down our sticky cards that were put up on Friday and noticed very little bug activity. There about 4 fungus Gnats spread out over 4 cards, probably because of the watering were doing. This was the beginning of the pest-monitoring sheet because we still had to do our EC/pH readings. The readings were OK and we wrote out our findings. Towards the end of the day we made a run to the compost because we had a bunch of old soil and plant material from the other days and came back to start cleaning. We started in the greenhouse and working our way out to the potting room. Only one customer came in and bought two blue Hydrangeas towards the end of the day. There were a few more house cleaning things we tended to then we headed out.