City Gardener

Director A... had me gather small 4-inch pots, 160 of them, and place them in trays to be filled with potting mix for planting of brassica seeds by agronomy students. I found the pots in the pot-room, the trays in the tray-room, and the potting soil bags in the room full of different types of soil, bark, vermiculite and perlite. Back in the workroom, I filled the trays with the empty pots, then dumped potting mix on top of the empty pots, spreading out the mix into the containers until they were full. I used an empty tray to press down on the pots to compress the soil just enough to squeeze out some of the excess air pockets from each small pot. Finally, each tray was set in a bath to soak up water from the bottom of the pot. Later, B came along to gently spray water onto the surface to ensure the small pots were adequately moist for seeds to germinate. The trays were then placed in a walk-in refrigerator to keep them cool and moist for later use in class. Working in D2 again, I notice...

   I spent the 3 hours of my shift almost entirely occupied by a single chore: scrubbing the black sooty mold off of the thick, leathery leaves of a ficus tree. The tree is in D2 (display room 2, tropical rainforest of New Caledonia) located in the northeast corner of the room. The sooty-mold problem had become more noticeable since the collapse of a tree which had been hiding the ficus from view.  The collapsed tree had become very top-heavy, on a spindly trunk unable to support the weight of its own canopy. There were a few minutes to perform a few other smaller chores: cleaning up leaves from D4. B showed me how to use the computer located in the workroom to enter my schedule into their online calendar. I entered the dates I would be coming to the greenhouse through April, 2023. I’ll have to remember to fill out their calendar when I return from my winter trip in April.