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Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Black Taro

This week the New Leaf Flower Shoppe is closed so that the Horticulture crew can get some work done around the 150 acre facility where I work. So many projects need help.

I figured that I would start with the Formal Garden area since the most visitors come to that area. We started on Monday, with a minimal crew, we started weeding out the waterfall area. After weeding, I started moving plants around. Then I had to teach one of the guys how to restack the slate river rocks around the liner of the waterfall and adjacent to the spillway. Finally, we planted some annuals and perennials.


With the very wet spring and then suddenly hot weather, the weeds and liriope have gone crazy. I have consciously used liriope in the flower beds to anchor the dirt in certain areas. Liriope has to be split every so often or it grows into ginormous clumps. We had ginormous clumps of variegated Liriope to split. It was replanted in small batches in a patchwork design at the top of the bed under a very old holly tree where nothing else grows. We also had variegated vinca to cut back as it was growing over the top of bushes and grasses. Finally, we had a mound of ornamental grass that had died in the middle so it had to be dug out, cut down and replaced.


So far this week, the topics have been mostly focused on listening. Listening to instructions, or asking appropriate questions to find out how to do something versus just guessing how to do something. It was a small issue, but I asked that the white geraniums be off loaded from the truck to a certain place all together so that they could be planted with the red geraniums. I always lay out the plants where I want them planted to speed up the process and keep some semblance of order. Where did I find the geranium trays... all around the flagpole in 6 different places... since the red geraniums are in the bed by the flagpole. That doesn't sound too bad but I kept find geraniums and that was really annoying and since this happens all the time, it wears you out. We talked about following instructions and how important that is on a real job.

After all that was completed, I stopped to take this picture of the Black Taro that I had carefully brought with me from Texas. I was seriously thinking I had killed it because when I brought it to work I accidentally left it outside for a few hours. It acted like it was dead. However, it has returned to life and then some. It is shaded by the pine tree and gets water down the spillway and is very happy.

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