Maintenance Weekend Duties Begin, September 14-16th, 2018 Woodland Garden

By: Carlee and Harrison

            It’s the first couple weeks back into the school year and with it brings our weekend maintenance duties. This weekend Carlee and Harrison were scheduled to clean up the woodland garden. We started things off bright and early 8am Friday morning, we met Jeff at the greenhouse and retouched on the task list that Tim had given us for the weekend, the garden needed quite a bit of work. We took the four-seat RTV, with Harrison behind the wheel and went to grab the trailer so we’d have more room for tools and debris. It took some time getting used to the way the RTV drives, it stops pretty suddenly when you take your foot off the acceleration. Things get even more complicated once you attach a trailer to the vehicle but Harrison’s skill improved quickly throughout the weekend.

            Once we gathered all of our equipment it was time to get down to business. We were instructed by Tim to make some estimates as to how long it would take to complete the jobs we were doing and see how our actual time compared. This was a valuable learning experience so that we as students can gather an idea of how quickly and efficiently we’re able to finish tasks which will help us to provide more accurate quotes for our clients in the future, this will in turn save us a lot of hardship in our industry. We also learned very quickly that all of our quotes were way off.

 We had a lot of Daylilies and Rudbeckia to sheer back. With the frost soon approaching we originally wanted to leave the leftover debris in the garden so that it could break down and return to the soil. First we tried hand shearing the daylilies but found them too wet that the sheers weren’t really doing the job and the process was taking far too long. Harrison signed out the power sheers and put on the safety chaps and tried again with the daylilies, this was going a lot faster but still longer than we had estimated. With the daylilies as wet as they were it was too difficult to see what had been cut down and what was left, so as much as we wanted to leave the debris we unfortunately needed to rake it out so that Harrison could see what still needed to be cut. The Rudbeckia we found made much less of a mess and we were able to leave the debris from them in the gardens. We like to put as much back into the Earth as we can, but we wouldn’t leave debris like this in the front yard of a client's house as it does tend to look rather unsightly. While Harrison was power shearing, Carlee was using a handsaw and loppers to cut some dead wood out of a few Taxus in the perimeter of the garden. Upon completion she was happy to note that she had pretty well matched the time estimate she had given herself, until she noticed a couple more hedges that had been previously overlooked. The lesson she took from this was to be sure to thoroughly walk the site before starting the job, take notes of your daily tasks so that nothing gets missed.

            Friday felt like a pretty big day, being unfamiliar with the RTV and trailer we gave ourselves a bit of extra time to clean up in the evening and park everything back in its place. This turned out to be a good decision we found out as we pulled in to the trailer parking lot to find a truck in the space that had made it easier to pick the trailer up that morning. This resulted in a humorous display of Carlee running around the vehicle to spot at different angles while Harrison made a number small corrections to wiggle the trailer into the narrow space it needed to be, this took a lot longer than both of us would have liked but we got through it. We dropped the trailer back off without being attacked by the family of wasps that live next to it, and headed back to the greenhouse to sign out and head home for the night, ready to come back refreshed for the next day.
           

Saturday was a lot quicker to start now that we were both more familiar with equipment and what jobs we still needed to complete. The last of the power shearing was finished early Saturday so we both switched over to hand pruning different areas to help clear up the sidewalks and pathways, when doing this we tried to take enough of the plants back that they were out of the way of people walking or wheelchairs etc. but left enough to keep the natural shape and form of the plants. Carlee weeded and pruned around the perimeter of the garden, cutting back floppy, yellow Colocasia leaves and any other dead branches which really helped to tidy up the overall look of the garden. Same as Friday, for cleanup Carlee strapped on the back pack blower and cleaned off all the soil and debris that found its way onto the pathways throughout the day, while Harrison loaded the tools and compost into the back of the RTV. With the tools brought back to the tool room and put away we sped off to the compost pile, then back to the greenhouse for end of day sign out.

Sunday, our last day of weekend maintenance. With a lot of our tasks finished up, our list of tools and equipment to sign out in the morning grows smaller and smaller. Our main focus for Sunday was finishing weeding and edging which unfortunately we didn’t really end up getting to. Weeding starts off seeming as if it will be a simple and quick task but the woodland garden has a lot of plants that almost overlap which leave a lot of sneaky, hard to reach areas for weeds to grow. There’s also a lot of bindweed and thistle throughout the garden which have difficult root systems. We found this to be one of our biggest issues when it came to time management, was thoroughly extracting all of the weeds. Clean up went the same as the last two days, though we did give ourselves slightly more time than Saturday as we wanted to be sure that everything was as clean as Friday before we started, and that all of the tools, equipment and keys were accounted for.

Overall we would say that we had a successful first weekend maintenance duty, we were tasked with and completed a lot. The woodland garden is looking much nicer than when we started on Friday and both team members feel as if we were able to develop our strengths and work on our weaknesses and took this weekend as a great learning experience.