Cuddy Garden
Weekend Duty March 18-20
Spring has finally arrived, and with the coming
of spring begins the busiest times for most horticulturists. The Fanshawe
College horticulture students are no exception either, we start our maintenance
weekend duty schedules. Taking care of the cuddy gardens for a weekend is
pretty exciting, we gain skills toward ground maintenance and making our own
executive decisions about tasks. The Cuddy gardens will soon be busy in the
next couple weeks with the third and final round of the second years Certified
Landscape Technician exams that begin in April. Our goal for our weekend duty
was to help clean up a part of the Cuddy gardens to break away from fall and
winter into the wonderful season of spring.
Our weekend duty starts out with a familiar
routine, we arrive Friday morning to meet the head technician of Cuddy gardens.
Then we go on a walk through the gardens while receiving instructions and tasks
to complete over the weekend. We then went over locking and alarming procedures
of the Cuddy garden facilities and contact methods in case of emergencies. Once
we had an understanding of everything, we grabbed our tools together and began
our assigned tasks. Our first task at hand was to weed and remove small twigs
from the Alpine rock garden, this took up a good chunk of time since the
removal of twigs had to be done by hand. Once completed we headed over to a
garden bed by the house to prune back some perennial shrubs while removing the
dead stems and flower heads. We then proceeded to remove large branches from
the garden that had fallen from the trees during the winter and cleaned out the
rose shrubs. We closed up our day with many trips to the compost along with
forming our own stick/ branch pile to be used in the chipper later in the week.
We arrived Saturday morning excited to be
on our own for the first time, usual morning routine of signing in and
disarming the facilities. The morning was brisk and chilly with most of the
garden still semi frozen from the night before. Not wanting to damage any plant
material we started our work day with the removal of burlap from the alpine
garden and the surrounding area that protected some evergreen shrubs through
the winter, we also quickly tied up some vines to a beautiful wooden arbor.
Once the sun started to shine and the gardens thawed out, we started back on
the task of cutting back hydrangeas, cotoneasters, and bamboo. Our next task
ahead was to remove walnuts from the garden beside the walnut tree, this task
was tad tedious since these walnuts had to be removed by hand. We then ventured
toward the greenhouses to pick up even more large branches to add to our
growing pile. We then re-entered the alpine gardens to clean up some dead plant
material, adjust the botanical tags to their right position, and then raked the
garden over lightly to finish it off. We then completed a few small tasks of
putting tools and pots away with many more trips to the compost and stick pile.
We ended our day in sunny but cool weather raking pruned hydrangeas before
heading for the compost for the last time that day.
Overall this weekend duty taught us some
great skills and what we can accomplish on our own as professionals. As second
years in our last semester, it’s a bit sad seeing this weekend come to an end.
With already completing our greenhouse weekend duty it just shows how close we
are to finishing this program and ending our two-year journey with the Fanshawe
Horticulture Technician program. We first arrived at Cuddy gardens as first
years for the hort fest and continued to visit these grounds for arboriculture,
greenhouse, maintenance, and construction classes. Over these past two years we
have gained plenty of knowledge and memories at Cuddy gardens, and we
understand why it plays such a big role in this program. Even though we will be
returning in these last three weeks, there is a sentimental feeling in
finishing this weekend.
