Weekend Blog Friday, October 14 – Sunday, October 16

Lexi Drenth and Brett Blakey

 

Friday, October 14^th, 2016:

            Today was a big day for all the second year Horticulture students due to our first day of CLT Testing held at Cuddy Gardens. The students got separated into two different groups; morning and afternoon. Lexi and Brett were in the morning group so they could work in the gardens after they were done. Due to the testing held here and there were tests going on all day, we had to stay on one half of the house to not disturb the other students. The tests that we had to do were Tree Planting & Staking, Irrigation Repair &Adjustment, Basic Programming Control and the Plant I.D. test. We all got separated into smaller groups so we could be done with the time we had in the morning. For lunch, all students, judges and teachers attended a lunch donated by Landscape Ontario. After we had our lunch, Brett and Lexi were to meet Nate at the tool shed. Nate tried to go through all of our weekend duty and orientation stuff, but it was difficult. He usually has the classroom to show the students the alarm, but the afternoon students were in the classroom and Nate, Brett and Lexi were not allowed to intervene with the testing students. When they were done explaining, all three of them went to go to work. Lexi got assigned to clean all the dry dirt off of trays, while Brett and Nate brought the small succulents into the corner room of the house for the winter. . There was a plant stand for as many as the little ones that they could put on it. The trays that Lexi was cleaning were put under the rest of them since the floor in that room is hard wood. After that task was complete, Nate walked us through the dry garden to point out the tropical and cactus plants that we needed to bring in this weekend. Then Nate showed us the carport and patio plants that needed to be put in the pool room. Brett and Lexi had a little time to spare, so they started to cut back the annuals in the tropical planters by the carport. After they put all their tools away, they met Nate at the classroom and he went through the whole house with them to show everything that needs to be locked for setting the alarm. By the end, Brett and Lexi were confident with all the stuff that needed to be put away or locked up.

Saturday, October 15^th, 2016:

            On a very cold morning, Brett and Lexi showed up at Cuddy Gardens at 7:40 A.M. Just after they got there, James showed up to work as well. He was there to cut the turf. James unlocked everything for all of them to enter the buildings. Brett and Lexi started off the day with making a game plan of what was going to happen. They both wanted to get the dry garden done as fast as possible. The dry garden had most cactus plants in it. The plants were still in the pots which were just buried into the ground with regular soil covering the pot. It was a difficult start to the day, the first plant did not have a pot around the root ball, the second plants pot was shattered when we dug into the soil around it and the third plant was just too heavy for Brett and Lexi to lift it up so they got James to come and help. None of them wanted to get any of the cactus needles poked at them, so they found an old card board box to wrap around the plants when transporting. Although, the box helped quite a bit, both Lexi and Brett got a couple puncture wounds. A cactus fell on Lexi and when we were transporting one into the cactus room, Brett backed up into one. There was one cactus that was really tall and heavy, as they brought it into the room, they were both just focusing on placing it properly and not dropping it, they forgot about the height. As they put it down, a piece of that cactus broke off. We cleaned the cactus milk from the plant. Then we decided that we did not want to waste it at all, so they decided to let it dry out, than plant it in a pot of sandy soil. That took up most of our day. We took the end of the day to clean up all our tools, and start to clean up the house.

 

Sunday, October 16^th, 2016:

            On a cloudy morning, they both arrived early to work. With that short time, they decided how the day was going to go since they were expecting rain in the early afternoon. They started off at getting all the tools they needed out, than they went over to the greenhouses and dug out those two cactus plants. While Brett was blowing off the back patio and walk ways, Lexi started to put away the tropical plants into the pool room. After Brett was finished, both Brett and Lexi went out and raked the gravel and woodland paths (Figure 6). When they completed that, Mr. Pascoe came in on the Saturday, and asked us if we could move all the clay pots right up to the brick wall where a bench was. Mr. Pascoe asked us to put the table, chairs and bench into the fire place room with the tropical plants. After completing that, they both were putting away plants into the pool room. It started to rain as they were just starting their lunch, so after lunch they decided to stay inside and clean all the pots and floors and write their blog. They knew the rain was not going to last for more than a couple hours so it worked to their benefit to work on stuff inside while the weather was gross. After the rain quit, they had two hours to try to put away the rest of the tropical plants into the tool room.