Greenhouse Weekend Blog

Camillo and Norna

April 1^st, 2018

Hydrangeas are out; Petunias are in!! The weather is changing outside so that we’re getting longer, warmer days, and we’re not the only ones getting prepared for some major planting!

The last hydrangeas flew out the doors on Thursday and Friday, with some stragglers finding new homes over the weekend by surprise. As illustrated by the pictures above, our greenhouse is half full of seedlings, which will soon need to be potted, and take up almost the entire greenhouse. These plants will be ready for planting and sale by summer, with many already spoken for, since the greenhouse helps to sustain itself through these sales. It’s exciting to have this sort of system, knowing that the demands for plants need to be met for a customer base, and not just the school.

Because of the long weekend, our Sunday was cut in half and shared with Thursday, giving us a significant advantage to getting our tasks done for the weekend, but also a great way to give us some more leisurely pacing for the holiday. We were able to take out a majority of our smaller tasks on the first day to give other, larger tasks more time on later days. Our progression down our list, however, was often interrupted in the first days by the sale, and we were totally ok with that!

A quiet weekend, we spent a large part of our time taking care of the new stock of seedlings and other young plants on top of the usual tasks of watering, and making cuttings and stock baskets. This is a task that can easily be forgotten, and an inventory that can easily get outdated. Just because in our second year we know more about what we’re doing, doesn’t mean plants don’t often die during the propagation process. (Nature is a wonderous and sometimes mysterious thing! Keep that in mind for your own home projects and don’t get discouraged!) We also spent some time consolidating plants into shared pots where need be, and eliminating any with signs of disease or death. It can feel merciless, but we know it’s for the god of the growth of all the other plants to come!

Another task we spent a bit of time on was researching the planting requirements for various seeds. Part of keeping out stock exciting and fresh is playing with new plants and seeing what we are capable of growing. Seeds are exchanged from all over the world and we have the pleasure of getting as many as we can to germinate. As with other forms of propagation, sometimes we do have some that die, but many are very successful and we look forward to potting them in the future!

Not only does it make our inventory more interesting, but watering as well. If you were to visit our greenhouse right now, you would see the two end benches filled with cuttings and seedlings on heat mats, which need plain water because the roots cannot withstand fertilizer in their sensitive state. The geraniums, cannas, and petunias, on the other hand, love the heavy fertilization, and are often thirsty or hungry, especially as they grow larger into the summer months. Finally, many of the other plants take an all-purpose 20-20-20 mix, and having each of these different crops side by side adds an extra element of interest to the morning and evening crop-walking.

With such a variety of plants, one would expect to find a variety of pests. Thankfully, we were able to find only a few, including aphids, which we are already treating with bank-crops and beneficial parasitic wasps, and fungus gnats, which can be expected, to some extent, when plants are over-watered. This can often happen in the greenhouse, especially with so many students looking after the same crops. We were careful to keep the watering to a minimum in these areas, so that some plants would have an opportunity for their soils to dry out between waterings. The aphids we treated with insecticidal soap, and were conveniently able to cut out a lot of pests with our scheduled pinching and trimming of our stock plants.