Greenhouse Weekend Duty Blog

By: Baylee and Mitchell

On Friday, we started with our opening checklist and opening the blackout curtains. Everything seemed in order with the checklist so then we met with Jeff for further instructions and he gave us a list of tasks to complete over the weekend. Once we had finished talking to Jeff we collected Cardoon seeds out of their pods, jarred them, labeled them and put them in the fridge. We went for lunch then walked the crop, found nothing of concern. We opened up the point of sale system during hours of business on Friday. We then pruned and potted the Geraniums and Easy Wave Petunia in sq. 1L pots as well as taking cutting from the Easy Wave Petunia using sanitized secateurs and potted the Easy Wave Petunias.

 We then went on to re-potting the succulent arrangements. After re-potting, we closed the point of sale system before we started to clean up for the day. We circled checked the RTV and did a dump run of compost, pruned and potted Canna’s into crates and then did our closing checklist and closing of the curtains. We couldn’t return the key due to the key being signed out by an unknown person so Jeff locked it for us.

Saturday morning, we got the key from security, unlocked the greenhouse and did our opening checklist and opening of the curtains. We started with propagating succulents and that took up most of our day. We noticed some Mealy bugs of the Coleus that we were going to propagate so we separated them from the rest of the greenhouse and inspected nearby poinsettias for any mealy bugs, we did not find any.

         

We took the watering tank and watered plants in front of bookstore and in the library. We made labels for all cuttings we did, as well as the non labelled flats of lavender scallops. We repotted some existing succulents due to the media being too low. We also repotted the Royal Poinciana due to it having a heavy lean to one side. We cut out dead straw from grasses with sanitized secateurs. After we had most of what we wanted done for the day we started cleaning up and doing the closing checklist as well as closing the curtains. Once we had finished cleaning up, we locked up the greenhouse and we returned the key to security.

For the last day, Sunday, we started with fixing the propagation chamber; its hose for the sprinklers was detached, causing water to not go through the misters. We ran the misters for a few minutes to restore proper moisture and humidity. We then started with the opening checklist and opening the blackout curtains and walking the crop and then finished labeling anything unlabeled. We determined that the crop needed a watering, so after consulting the culture chart we decided to do a flush of all plants including mini’s and standards, we then water any other baskets that may have need it.

After the watering we cleaned up the greenhouse staging area and waited roughly an hour before taking pH and EC reading from all cultivars of poinsettias in the greenhouse. We also cut the dead foliage off of the Colocasia with sanitized secateurs.

  

After cutting dead foliage we cleaned up leaves and put into compost. We organized all pots in the tractor bay, we then took everything out of the tractor bay, swept and washed the floors. We washed all of the equipment and put it all back in the tractor bay. We clean greenhouse floor, cleaned up and washed all tools, pots, trays, and then washed the floor in the greenhouse staging area. We then did our closing checklist and closed the blackout curtains and then returned the key to security.