Weekend Duty Blog

BY: Justin M. and Will S.

            Our weekend duty was from September 22^st to September 24^th. Our job was to clean up the Louise Weekes garden and install some fresh mulch.  We started at 7:50 am with Jeff providing instructions and a tour of the campus to show us where everything we needed was. This took up quite a bit of time our first day. While showing us the gardens we are required to clean up, Jeff had my partner and I tell him what we would do to clean it up and make it look nice. This was great because it is fairly easy to follow instructions, so if he just said, “Do this, this, this and this” we aren’t learning much, where if he leaves it up to us to decide it puts more pressure on us to make it how we would want it to look. The Louise Weekes gardens were quite covered in weeds and unwanted Eastern Redbud saplings. We spent the rest of the day weeding the gardens and emptying the greenhouse compost whenever needed.

            Day 2 is when the week end got a little more fun! At the beginning of day 2, we finished off the weeding which took maybe 2 hours or so. After all the weeding was done, we decided next we should tackle the pruning of shrubs/cutting of perennials. There was not many shrubs in the gardens that needed to be trimmed up. Weigela florida ‘Bristol Ruby’ was in dire need of a pruning. Since it looked like the weigela hadn’t been pruned in a while we sort of mixed the two pruning methods. First we cut out the super mature growth which will encourage new growth. This got rid of a lot of the long shoots sticking up. After that we tipped the remaining shoots, attempting to give it a good shape. There was also a shrub that had a lot of dead wood on it, which we removed. We also pruned out the reverting leaves on the Euonymus fortunei ‘Emerald Gaiety’ (wintercreeper) because if we were to leave them even more would revert and eventually the whole plant would be reverted back to straight species. There was a peony that we thought needed to be removed, but a google search told me that the peony was generating and storing away energy for next season. We should have removed it later in the season but Jeff said there was no one else going back to that garden until winter, so we removed it now to avoid an eyesore come winter. We also got all the edging done and some mulch in the gardens.

            Day 3 we spent most of the day on the tractors loading the mulch, and running wheelbarrows to the garden. This was really fun because we got to drive the tractors and gave us some experience with pulling trailers and backing them up. Once we finished spreading the mulch we blew all the mulch that we spilt back into the garden beds. With our edge on the garden all the mulch fell neatly against the side with very minimal amounts spilling over onto the sidewalk, which we blew back in. Overall weekend duty was a great experience and we learned a lot in time management and maintenance skills.