As you guys may know I was here last weekend on my Landscape and Maintenance practical. This weekend I had my Greenhouse Plant Production practical here at Cuddys. This weekend is full of interesting things.
Beginning of the weekend was a little hectic because I had to print out all the plant labels for Iris siberica, Lazula syvatica, Rhodotypos scandens, Calamagrostis x acutiflora 'Karl Forester', Hemerocallis x ‘Stella de Oro’, Pulmonaria x Lungwort, Miscanthus sinensis, Miscanthus sinensis ‘Variegata’, Sedum x Autumn Joy, Euphorbia polychroma, and last but certainly not least, Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Overdam’. We had a class here on Wednesday and potted a whole bunch of Iris’s and multiple types of grasses, unfortunately that day we didn’t have use of the label machine so that was my duty on Friday to print and distribute all the labels to the desired plants. The picture below has some of the plants that I labelled, including Iris siberica.
Saturday September 21
Although it was a chilly day, I enjoyed working and being productive. I started off the day with turning on the irrigation to water plants in the hoop house, and turn on the irrigation for the plants outside. Even though it rained, it was still not enough to satisfy them. I then moved on to finishing up with all the labels and moved on to the Arundo donax, which is Giant Reed Grass. I needed to cut back the grass, and do some re potting into smaller pots because there was a mixture of sizes and I wanted it to be unison. Once I was done that I had to move them into the coldframe to begin to harden them off.
Steps to why we put plants into the coldframe.
1st Hardening off the plants for fall acclimation, we withhold fertilizer and let the plant dry down between irrigation.
2nd We then compact the plants inside the cold frame, and place the bate in the bate station. It is designed that kids or pests do not get into the bate. It also keeps the bate dry to allow for rebating when necessary.
3rd Early to mid-November when plants harden off we cover the coldframe with Opaque Nursery Film.
We then make sure plants are watered at field capacity prior to freeze up. The reason to why we arrange the plants in plant type and pot size is so we can apply culture to the plants as needs. Different plants of course need different amounts of water, so if we were to have a mixture of plant types together, with smaller plants in small pots they will either get too much water or not enough.
Later that afternoon I turned the irrigation back on, because I only had it on for 2 hours in the early morning, and the sun surprised me and came out for a while so I it was time for the plants to have a little drink. I began to move some of the Sedum Autumn Joy, and Karl Forester Grass to the hoop house to do some divisions. They get repotted from a 3 gallon pot to a 1 gallon pot and are now in the hoop house for overwintering. When I say division I don’t mean math by any means, what I do mean is I had to cut back the grass and the sedum flowers and then remove them from the pots and cut them in half. From there I just re potted them then placed them in the hoop house. The picture below is a division of Sedum x Autumn Joy.
Sunday came, and it happened rather fast. But the plan for my day was to do the best that I could and finish off what divisions I had done, and to re pot the Rhodotypos scanden which is Black Jetbead. This plant is in the propagation chamber with other little plants, there were only about 12 of them and I repotted them in 1 gallon pots, but because they are small I put 3 plants per pot.
At the end of the day, it is time to clean and organize. I moved a lot of pots around, did a big sweep of the hoop house. All in all it was yet another great and eventful weekend.
Denise
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