Cuddy Garden Weekend Duty March 18-20

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.  

 

 

Sunday morning met us with warmer weather and the exciting joy of knowing we were in the last stretch of our weekend duty. Our morning started off with the usual routine of signing in and disarming the facilities, we then headed over the tool shed for the Kubota, wheelbarrow, and garden tools. We started of with cutting back some spiraea and removing the dead material, we then moved on to cleaning out dead hostas. Our next portion of our day was to rake up the dried up bean pods that covered the side turf area of the house. After another trip to the ever growing compost pile we began measuring out a part of the cuddy gardens for a maintenance assignment to complete later that day. We used a sweet and interesting tool for this assignment called the road runner, its basically a measuring tape and a calculator combined onto a rolling wheel. The rest of our Sunday was spent raking up and removing dead plant material before heading back to the tool room to clean our tools and the Kubota that was used during our weekend duty. We closed our Sunday up with taking pictures for this blog and making sure everything was left as it was before we arrived.

 

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.