Fanshawe College Weekend Maintenance Duty
September 13 th -15 th , 2019
Dylan, Hilary and Jacob
Fanshawe weekend duties have arrived for us second year students who ever continued with the
program in 2019. After some concise explanations given to us by our instructors on what was expected of us this coming semester, we were divided into groups and given specific weekends including the Fridays before them and tasked with completing exercises with educational and business tones around the college.
Ours was the first weekend duty and we had the pleasure and great fortune of starting on Friday the
13th. We started having some of the best weather of September. The London Air Show was starting as well creating a fair amount of traffic for people that decided to use the shuttles that operated off
campus grounds.
Friday September 13 th
We began our weekend duties by speaking with our resident green house guru Jeff Rowley. After a brief run down on what was expected of us; Jeff took us around the campus to look at the job sites we would be working on. We were expected to fix a poorly laid sod job and regraded another site of another job sod area. On top of that, we went through a lecture on CPTED. An acronym for Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. Lastly, we travelled to the front of T building near the bus stops where we were charged with removing a nectarine tree and deal with an overgrown garden bed.
Consulting amongst ourselves; we endeavored to first deal with the simple and time-consuming job of fixing the sites of sod.
The first site was a mishmash of oddly shaped sod rolls. These were the cuttings taken from the other
sites. Placed in a jig saw fashion, we tidied the area up by laying string lines and cutting off oddly shaped ends and corners. We then edged the area and relayed some of the pieces that were deemed
acceptable. The finishing touches was to try and level off the edges that seemed to suddenly drop in
severe angles and grades. A side note: we were also asked to give an estimate and bill of the site as
though we were professional contractors.
After dealing with site number one, we left for site two. The site was substantially larger and required
top soil to be added to fix dips in the uneven grade of the sod. It also had small sliver pieces within itself and exposed top soil surrounding it. This was easily fixed with a bit of elbow grease and grass seed. We seeded the edges and areas that would not prove favourable for strips of sod to root successfully. This was the last task before we finished our first day of weekend duties.
Saturday September 14 th
The morning sun struck the green house at 8 PM giving it a brilliant glittering glow when we and the
green house team met to start the beginning of our day. After a brief time discussing our plan of action and conducting safety checks on our equipment, we took off to the Fanshawe tool shed to equip ourselves for dealing with our next task: the nectarine tree.
Typical arboriculture equipment would be required and as lovely as it would have been to have access to a chain saw, we were only authorized to use hand tools. We ended up using pruning saws and extended pole blades.
Zipping around the campus grounds in our RTV (Rough Terrain Vehicle), we ended up at the front of
school and unloading to take this tree to task. We had predicted that this would be a physically
challenging task but the tree was a soft wooded one and the tools were new all lending to a very quick and efficient tree removal.
With the tree gone and out of the way, we began tackling the garden adjacent to the now vacant site
that the tree once occupied. The blood grass had overtaken the gardens it was planted in and required
some serious work done. Below is a picture we took that shows how the grass propagates itself through rhizomes.
The blood grass was substantial. We managed to make a serious dent in it but with the days end
approaching, we decided as a group to take the compost back and start our end of day. We would finish this tomorrow.
Sunday September 15 th
We started the day again at 8 AM. With morning coffees into us, the safety checks and preparation were done and over with quickly for tackling the last bit of the garden at T building. After a significant time was spent on pulling out weeds and shaping the garden, we completed most of our third task with bits and pieces of landscaping yet to be finished.
It was lunch time so after a brief respite, we came together to discuss the plan for the second part of the day.
We split up with one of us watering plants, the other landscaping at T building and the other working on this blog post. Although a simple process, our remaining tasks ate up the last bit of time spent here on the Sunday.
With the post done and out of the way, we spent the remainder of our time weeding and looking for any plants with identifiable problems.
