Weekend Duty Blog - Lauren Friesen & Geoff Trenholm

Friday September 28, 2018

Friday was interesting; Geoff and I were only in the greenhouse for an hour before we had to leave for our field trip to volunteer at Hawk Cliff Woods. Then we were back in the greenhouse from 1 to 5PM.

We started the morning by opening the blackout curtains. As Tobias and Nicole mentioned in their blog post last weekend, the Euphorbia pulcherrima (poinsettia) are at that stage in development where we growers begin to manipulate their day and night environment. We want it to mimic the photoperiod needed for them to start flowering in time for winter holidays. Basically, poinsettias need 12 hours of light exposure, and 12 hours in the dark. This mimics their native environment on the equator in Mexico.

The association of poinsettias with Christmas comes from an old Mexican legend of a girl too poor to give a gift for Jesus’s birthday. An angel inspires her to collect seeds from the side of the road, and to place them before the church altar. Miraculously, red flowers bloomed from the weeds and became poinsettias.

Once we got back from the field trip, it was time for cuttings. (It’s always time for cuttings.) Jeff Rowley popped in and out while we worked, once with a new assignment, courtesy of Mike Pascoe. We were to sort, label, and lay out to dry a bunch of seeds Mr. Pascoe has collected from around the country.

Jeff showed us how to close up the till before he left. One of our classmates noticed little pawprints in the dust behind the printer; is there a squirrel in here?

Saturday, September 29, 2018

We opened the greenhouse for the day without any troubles, and then it was onto more cuttings for me! And then some leaf cuttings! But not just any leaf cuttings, Sue Millar had me do split vein cuttings. Instead of shoving half the leaf in the soil, I very carefully sliced the main veins of the back of large begonia leaves before pinning them flat into the soil. Sue says this is the slowest form of propagation we’ve done yet.

While I did that, Geoff began work on Pascoe’s seed collection. He ran into some trouble when some of the bags were either unlabeled, or else vaguely labeled, but he managed.

As it turns out, there was indeed a squirrel in the greenhouse. He scurried behind me to hide beneath the cabinets between the bathrooms. I opened the garage door, propped open the door to the garage, grabbed a squeegee and moved one of the cabinets so I could get underneath it. I succeeded in spooking the squirrel out, and does he run away from the scary lady with a stick? Does he run out the door to freedom? Of course not! The silly creature ran at me instead, jumped over the squeegee, dodged around me, and climbed up the ladder into the loft. I decided to leave him be.

After lunch, I finally finished the cuttings. Geoff and I tried again to corral the squirrel out the door, but he hid in the radiator across from the bathrooms instead. So we made a compost run and fueled up the RTV. The gate then refused to close, of course. The security guys teased me about “breaking it.”

Finally we went through the closing routine. The squirrel stayed hiding in the radiator, presumably until after we left.

Sunday, September 30, 2018

It was cold and rainy this morning, but at least the chain didn’t fall off my bike on the way to the greenhouse like yesterday. I hadn’t seen him yet, but I knew the squirrel (whom I’ve taken to calling George the Directionless in my head) was still in the building.

We opened up the greenhouse and set to washing the floors. I managed to scrub some of the algae off, but I didn’t want to flood the floors too much. Geoff finished washing up between the aisles while I started digging up some plants from the side of the greenhouse. They’re Canna ‘Red Futurity’ and we’re pulling them up to dry the bulbs in crates to sell next year. After break I did the same for the Alocasias (Elephant Ears) across from the greenhouse.

Our last plant job was to dig up some Pennisetum alopecuroides, (Fountain Grass) split them, and report them to be set on the heated mats in the greenhouse. We used steak knives to split them, of all tools.

Today we washed everything, from the greenhouse floors to racks to loads of pots. We had managed to complete all of our assigned tasks, except for the optional extra task of doing yet more cuttings, this time of the Lavender Scallops (Bryophyllum fedtschenkoi ‘Variegata’). There are so many in the greenhouse and they’re getting overgrown; they do need to be worked on, but after the seemingly-endless amount of cuttings we did this weekend, I can’t say I’m too disappointed we didn’t get to these!

Afterwards

Overall, working in the greenhouse this weekend was hard work, but oddly serene work as well. It’s very repetitive, in an almost soothing way...when there isn’t a silly rodent running around, anyway.