Working in the rose garden, row clean up and marketing meeting

Work: I started at 8.30 today, due to having a meeting from 3.30-5 with marketing. Of which, more in a sec.

First off though, I went and helped Robin in the rose garden. The rose gardens is fairly small really, or at least in comparison to Wellington BGs rose garden. It has six main beds, some climbers trained up the surrounding stone walls, and a bed of miniatures. I started with deadheading the main beds of roses. It's done the same way as I had learnt in Wellington, taking stems back to the first or second set of five leaves. The roses are looking pretty healthy really, more so considering that its coming to the end of summer (when regardless of how diligent you are with controlling disease, roses will get something. Blackspot, rust etc...). But it has been a dry summer, and this has probably helped a lot. Robin is also committed enough to go through beds removing diseased leaves, a practise made practical by the smaller size of the garden. After deadheading I helped Robin take some soil samples that will go to the lab for analysis. A soil sample about a month ago revealed that the soil was slightly too acidic, and Robin has been liming to bring the pH up. Roses prefer a slightly acidic soil with a pH of about 6.5-6.

I left at lunch to go to row clean up. This one was pretty fun really, as it seemed I just got to play with machinery. First I weed wacked, and then I got the tractor to pick up some piles of debris in the old compost heap in order to make mowing easier. It was a learning curve as I hadnt driven a tractor that big, or with that set up before. Instead of a pedal 'forward-back', it had a stick select next to wheel. instead of gear ratios high, medium low, it had a numbered select. Bucket controls were the same though. It was good practise, and i had fun trying to use the bucket to grade the slope. And then we got training on the zero turn mower, which was also a bunch of fun. Great machine.

And then the marketing meeting... It was to help them reorganise their website, and required John Moore, Elizabeth Fite and me (all students) organising cards with website content on them (eg, "idea garden")....