Fanshawe College Greenhouse Weekend Duty Blog

By: Jared T, Jed H, Julia R.

It is always refreshing to walk in from the crisp - and rather cool - late September air into
the beautiful Fanshawe greenhouse, the poinsettia crop is looking refreshed having just been woken up from their 16 hour photoperiod (simulated 16 hour nights) and eagerly waiting for the sun to grace our beautiful campus. We, started this weekend off strong and dove right into the work we were given, completing the usual list of essential tasks to do when you first enter the greenhouse we noticed that the crop was looking a little dim, some bench’s seemed the be drooping and others weren’t looking as tip top as they could, we decided to give the plants an hour or so and see if
they would require watering that day, or the following, when we returned the sun was shining and the fans were running, it was time to water them, we took to the Dosatron, making sure it was set to the
right fertilizer (20-20-20 @ 250 ppm) and opened the flood gates, we let the water run for approximately 26 minutes, during this process we filtered in and out of benches to check on both dripper locations (within the pots) and overall saturation, we figured it best to let it run for a few extra minutes as assurance that everything was properly watered. Over the course of our first day we found endless opportunities to entertain ourselves, from collecting begonia cuttings and propagating them to potting up cuttings from the previous greenhouse weekend duty crews to make room for our own and then we had a quick meeting with Jeff R about an integrated pest management project he wanted us to do beyond just the usual. This rounded up our first day in the greenhouse.

Saturday the 28th was a special day in the greenhouse since we could just tell that there was some
sort of party going on, people were walking around drinking when we were just getting to campus at
around 7:30, we came to find upwards of 10 beer cans in the garden beds and strewn upon the grass
around the greenhouse, while Fanshawe and Western students alike were partying, we were spot watering some poinsettias that needed it and taking care of the succulents that also looked like they could use some water, we mutually decided we were in the right place after hearing in on various conversations from people passing the greenhouse, where ever they were going was brimming with police, unsurprisingly. Our second day went by just as fast as the first one, after some extra
cleaning in the tractor bay and outdoor greenhouse nursery marked that we had finished up all the tasks on our general list of things to do and went on to a couple tasks given to us by Jeff R., this involved taking to the sidewalk and hunting for acorns from a specific Oak tree, and when we came back we started our IPM research assignment, this involved a lot of counting tiny bugs under a microscope and recording there populations! At least we only had to do half the greenhouse, each time we took one down we put a fresh sticky sheet up, and then we started up our closing checklist and headed home ready for our next day in the greenhouse.

                                       One of the sticky sheets we were counting insects on


Our last day in the greenhouse, Sunday September 29th, started out a little choppy, a few more beer cans, and we seemed to have lost a member of our crew to what we can only assume was the
aforementioned party, but we wont know till we see her again, she was out of reach. So we just took to the day hoping she would appear and started with what we had planned on the day prior and hopped right into the PH and EC readings. unaware of what the readings were supposed to be, about halfway through we found the sheet indicating what it should be and discovered our readings to fall quite a bit short of the specifications EC-wise, unsure of whether it’s a problem on our part or not we made note of it and moved on the next task, break. Once we got back we hopped into cleaning, we took another look at the tractor bay and moved some plants around and made sure everything had plenty of water and moved inside to clean the greenhouse floor. A sweep and a quick weed to the outdoor garden beds had the place shining when we started our closing checklist and headed on home, bringing a nice close to our weekend at the Fanshawe Greenhouse.

                                            Just a nice picture of our amazing greenhouse

We all had a good time at the greenhouse and were looking forward to our next weekend duties around campus and at Fanshawe’s satellite campus, The Cuddy Gardens, until next time!