Christmas is Coming!

Weekend Duty Blog for November 9th - 11th, 2018

Nate and Claire

There were signs everywhere on duty in the Greenhouse this weekend that Christmas is on it’s way! On Friday morning we were greeted with the first snowfall of the season and the snow continued through most of the day. Our morning walk of the crop found all the poinsettias to be colouring-up beautifully, so we made sure to have all our poinsettia wrapping materials on standby in case a customer wanted to buy one ahead of our official poinsettia sale. In the meantime, we watered the whole poinsettia crop and an hour later took pH and EC readings of a selection from each cultivar. We found one ‘Christmas Wish Red’ plant to look a little dry and wilted, so we took extra readings for it to compare with a perkier one of the same cultivar and found that the wilted plant had a much lower EC value. To correct this, we spot-watered the plant to ensure it got its proper dose of fertilizer and returned it to its bench. In the afternoon, we were tasked with helping to re-pot a gigantic False Agave that had been donated to the program from Parkway Gardens. While it was too bad that the plant’s original planter had to be sacrificed in the process, the Agave seemed much happier to have more room to grow. Our final big task for the day was to propagate a huge selection of succulents harvested from the collection at Cuddy Gardens. We broke the plants apart into leaves and tops and set them in pans to callous, which will prevent bacteria and disease from entering the plant once its planted. We closed our afternoon with our first poinsettia sale, and promises of many more to come.

On Saturday we switched from propagating to germinating, and sowed a collection of seeds from Jardin botanique Alpin in Switzerland. Some of these require many weeks to begin growing, so hopefully we will start to see growth after the Christmas holidays. After completing the interior plant care route, we dove into holiday prep by harvesting pine cones and fronds of Euonymus, white pine, yews and cedar for our upcoming wreath making event. With a few ribbons around the fronds’ containers and some imitation snow to frost the windows, the greenhouse is beginning to look really festive! Sunday was Remembrance Day, so we observed our moment of silence in the morning before bedazzling some of our collected pine and spruce cones with spray glitter. While those dried, we got started planting our succulent pieces. It took us most of the day, but by the end we had nearly filled all the available space left in the greenhouse with new baby plants! With the poinsettia sale approaching, the baby plants will only have to crowd in a little bit longer - another sign that Christmas is coming!