City Gardener

The coordinator, A..., had me split and up-pot some tree cuttings I had taken on March 23, 2022. There were about 10 different varieties of tree cuttings, about half of them had successfully rooted. The others were completely dead. Pots where multiple cuttings were successful were split into several pots, each pot with one successfully growing cutting. A had me use a mixture of soil: one part of the vermiculite mix and one part of the bark mix.   These are the cuttings that rooted: Rhamnus alaternus (Mediterranean buckthorn) Balsamocitris daweii (Uganda;deciduous citrus tree) Macadamia integrifolia(Australian; macadamia nut tree) Pterocarya hupehensis(China, wingnut tree) Hibiscus splendens(Australia, pink hollyhock tree) Grewia biloba(Africa; flowering shrub) These cuttings did not root: Schinus molle (Peru) Grevillea robusta (Australia) Combretum kraussii (Africa) Juglans neotropica (Andes, walnut-like) Sapindus marginatus (North A...

A introduced me to another volunteer (C...) who has expert knowledge about orchids. He was instructing E... on the details of orchid care. C... is the greenhouse's expert orchid grower, with many award ribbons to his credit. I helped Al... and F... to move the floor-based small trees in C2. Their location was cleared, cleaned, and replaced by a waist-high table onto which we placed small plants. The space created on the adjacent low-table we placed the small trees up off of the concrete, presumably to allow better drainage, air circulation and pest resistance. Edible plants were placed at the south end of the low table. Bananas, gingers, and marantas were placed at the north end of the waist-high table. To make room for the waist-high table, we also had to remove one of the black troughs. The water plants within it (an aquatic fern Salvinia minima. “water spangles”) were relocated to a glass aquarium situated on the waist-high table. I scrubbed the sooty mold off from the leaves of...

A... had me move plants off from a bench in D3. We then moved the entire bench a couple of feet to allow workmen to repair overhead equipment (lights I suspect). In D3 I placed trays under large pots to collect insecticide. A... used a chemical called dinotefuran, adding is to pots to help control most types of scale. It is a neonicotinoid compound. I spent most of the time in D2 cleaning sooty mold off the leaves of several plants, notably Amborella and a fern from New Caledonia with leaves resembling a deciduous bush (Ptisana attenuata).