Greenhouse Duty Blog March 9 to 11, 2018

Tawny, Rebecca S.

Friday

                Supplying landscaping companies with plants is an important role served by the Fanshawe greenhouse. This provides a source of revenue for the program as well as a way for students to get hands on experience planning, planting and growing a crop with a set market date. With this in mind, we chose to make the focus of our weekend duty to make part of this process easier and more efficient for students. A key part of producing plants in the greenhouse is maintaining stock baskets which are plants that are used to propagate new plants which are sold to landscapers. We are frequently tasked during greenhouse class with updating the stock basket list and checking on the plants. Often this job is done quickly or overlooked because it is sometimes difficult and overwhelming. The stock plants are hard to reach, often hard to find, and the list of what we have is not always accurate. On Friday we dedicated ourselves to organizing the stock baskets, updating the list, and making new baskets to ensure there was at least two of each variety.

                On Friday we began organizing the plants alphabetically and labelling these sections so they are clear and easy to find. While we do not expect other students to keep the plants in this exact order, grouping them by the first letter of the genus name and keeping multiple like plants together (ex. Three metallic leaf begonias side by side) makes the plants much easier to find and going through each plant alphabetically made it clearer for us to see which plants we had and how many in order to update the list. While doing this we also updated the plant labels and ensured they were for the correct plant.

Saturday

                We made new stock baskets from rooted cuttings in four inch pots if they were available, and took cuttings of plants that needed to be propagated. There were several varieties that we did not know how to propagate and since the plants were still so small we did not want to risk taking cuttings that would not be viable. There was only one trailing violet plant in the greenhouse but it seemed very hardy and had lots of healthy growth. We did not know what type of cuttings to take from this type of plant and searching online did not provide any helpful information. We took a chance with this plant and cut off what looked like off-shoots and potted them. We are very interested to see if these will grow as it seems to be a very easy way to produce a new plant for sale if it is successful. We also took postage stamp cuttings from several begonia cultivars. When they are successful it is a simple way to grow several new plants from just one leaf.

                Not all plants that are sold in the greenhouse are grown from cuttings. While this is an easy way to grow a more mature plant quickly, some plants are very easy to grow from seed. We planted hundreds of marigold seeds on Saturday. This was done quite quickly by setting up a production line to fill trays, make holes in the soil and drop in the seeds. It is exciting to see the seeds planted in earlier classes sprouting already. We have to take special care however not to leave sprouts in the germination chamber too long as they will become long and leggy, and to frequently check that sprouted seeds in the greenhouse do not dry out as this can happen very quickly and kill the plants.

Sunday

                Daylights savings time began today so it was much darker when we arrived at the greenhouse and the curtains automatically opened later in the morning because of the time change. The priva system was not functioning properly on the computer but everything seemed to be functioning in the greenhouse including heat, fans, and curtains.

                We finished with the stock baskets on Friday so today’s focus was cleaning up and organizing the rest of greenhouse. We organized the chemical storage room to ensure everything was easy to find. We went through the tractor bay and made sure all the pots were in the correct spots and labeled. We washed and dried pots that we had used over the weekend. We also took EC and PH readings on the four different varieties of hydrangeas to ensure they are within the normal limits.

                We worked very hard to clean and organize the hanging stock plants and four inch stock plants over the weekend. We hope that by doing this it will make it easier for students and staff to locate them and know what plants we have on hand so that they can be propagated and we can continue to supply landscapers with summer annuals.