BLOOMING

HI GUYS,

As some of you know from following along, i'm passed the half-way mark of my internship, and in fact nearing its end. I have three more weeks left, so not to worry! I've still got time and experiences to share with you all. It's just unbelievable to me how much time has passed already, and I'm kinda sad that the end is coming soon. However all the time and experiences i've had thus far has given me a confidence in this position and also in the horticulture field. I feel comfortable and prepared for the jobs assigned to me each day, which is thrilling in itself that I am learning here and growing with that everyday. This internship is doing exactly what an internship should do for a student and i'm happy that I had the opportunity to obtain it. 

Now you're probably wondering what I've done for the past couple weeks and I'll share with you below.

PRODUCTION CENTER
The week started with working a lot in the production center, dividing, cutting, and propagating with our grower. For example there were a few clumps of Aspidistra elatior 'Starry Night' out in the garden in an area that used to be shaded. A couple trees in that same area were removed allowing a lot more sun in that once shady spot. The Aspidistra was becoming bleached from the high amount of sun so Rachel and I went out and dug them up to take divisions and propagate them. Another couple tasks were taking Coleus and Sweet Potato Vine cuttings for propagation, and potting around one hundred and fifty pine saplings. 

GREENWALL
A small task was helping our greenwall and greenroof research assistant clean up the greenwall. It had become a little wild with a lot of growth through spring and summer so cleaning up and determining what all was present in the wall was needed. 

 


VILLAGE GREEN
A cool fact about Moore Farms is that it also does all of Lake City's downtown landscaping. One day was spent working there cleaning up all the beds and maintaining the beautiful landscape in place there. The main task was cutting back all the coleus that was recently planted but growing to a leggy height and manicuring the mounded central main bed in the front of the village green. 

GIS/GPS

Something I was itching to do all summer was work with our plant recorder, who does all the GPS mapping and such, and the GIS intern. This was something completely foreign to me until the afternoon Rachel and I got to work with them. We were given the run down on the importance of mapping and plant location records in a botanical garden. It was super interesting to see a whole different aspect of the garden and we were even able to go into the garden and map a couple beds! Below is a picture of our plant recorder and GIS intern mapping the green roof. 

MORE BAMBOO

I know I talked a lot about bamboo last blog, as we worked a lot with it. We also did a bit more work with limbing some up these past two weeks and I took a picture this time so you all can have a better idea of what limbing bamboo up means and looks like.

FLOWER PRESSING CLASS
One of my favorite times in the past couple weeks was attending the flower pressing class. It was a class offered to the public by the garden, taught by the education intern. My sister was in town visiting so she was able to come too. We went out into the cut flower garden to harvest the flowers and learned how to quickly press them via microwave versus the month long pressing in books and such. After the quick pressing we were all able to design them on a canvas and seal them there by a clear drying glue. Below is a picture of the one I helped my sister create. 

FERTILIZING
The main entrance of the garden follows a pretty lengthy road that winds around the garden before taking you to the Visitors Center. Near the front of that road was a slightly boring area so over a hundred small needle palms were planted. Rachel and I went out a couple days after they were planted and fertilized them all. 


FIRE TOWER LANE
There is an area of the garden that starts near the Visitors Center and takes you along to the Native garden area. That stretch is called Fire Tower Lane. There are quite a few young willow trees in that area that are not yet mature enough to stand upright alone, so we did some staking and re-staking of those. Also there were a couple Sycamore trees and a Pine we pruned a few bad limbs and low laying limbs off before they started damaging the tree or surrounding trees. Rachel and I also weeded in the area and pruned and dead-wooded the small shrubs.


ENTRANCE HOUSE CLEAN UP
Within the first couple weeks of my internship, and the first day of Rachel's, one of our biggest tasks was cleaning up and designing/planting at the entrance house. The entrance house is at one of the entrances of the garden and is primarily the first thing people see when entering the garden so cleaning up those beds was a necessary priority since not too much had been done there in the past month or so. However, because Rachel and I had worked in that area before and knew what we had planted, the job was done more confidently. For example we pruned and trained rose bushes, weeded all the beds, sheared hedges, pruned trees and shrubs, cut back mums and other overgrown areas, and cleared out dead or dying plant material. It was definitely a full day of hard work but it was fun to see our previous work a month and half later; seeing how some things grew very well and filled in, how some didn't survive, or how the same plant on each side of the house grew different because of its location or sun/shade etc. 


JC RAULSTON ARBORETUM
Like I mentioned in the last blog, through Moore Farms and the JC Raulston Arboretum we had a great opportunity of doing an intern experience there at the Arboretum with their interns and horticulturists like they had here at Moore Farms a couple weeks ago. The Arboretum is located in Raleigh, North Carolina so we left early one morning and traveled the pretty three hour drive there. Upon arrival we jumped right in with what one of their horticulturists and interns were working on. They were creating pathways in their Eucalyptus bed. So we got to work digging a shallow section throughout the bed and then filled it with mulch to serve as the walkway. Once we finished we were taken on a tour by the other horticulturist throughout the beautiful arboretum! 
The next day we helped clean out an area of the arboretum called the Asian Valley, pulling weeds and cutting back dead bamboo stalks. As the day progressed we took numerous cuttings of Lantana, Desert Willow, Phlox, and many many more. We had a full heavy cooler at the end of two hours and spent the rest of the day propagating the cuttings in the greenhouse. 

The morning of our third day was spent at Plant Delights Nursery and oh my goodness, that place is amazing! It is one of the largest mail order companies in the country. It also has a botanical garden where they trial all of their plants and species they collect over seas before propagating and putting on the market for costumers. It was so beautiful and incredibly impressive. I could have spent weeks there exploring, learning and marveling at the species they have growing wonderfully in the North Carolina climate. The owner toured us around a bit and his passion was as incredible as the plants he showcases. Below are some of the many pictures I took while walking around! Enjoy :)

Sowing Seeds

HOWDY again my friends!

It's been another crazy-full two weeks. The time slipping away so quickly shouldn't keep coming as a surprise to me but anyhow follow along in this post and see what I've been up too most recently!

BAMBOO
I love love love bamboo. So when Rachel and I were assigned to travel to Chapel Hill, NC to pick up some mature bamboo (Phyllostachys bambusoides) for the garden, I was pretty excited. We had to be careful driving with 20ft bamboo in the truck bed, but we made it successfully back to the farm and placed it in our nursery!

A few days later we assisted with it's placement in the garden. Our project was able to make full circle, from delivering the bamboo to planting it. Neither of us had ever experienced planting bamboo before so it was a fun task to be involved in. 

Later on in the week we did a lot of pruning on an already established section of bamboo in the garden. It had become a little wild and over grown so we up-pruned it (meaning we chose a height at which we pruned off all the branches coming off the stalk up to that height, leaving just the bare stalk until that height line). It created more of a clean, formal look for the bamboo and also allowed viewing through the bamboo.

DAYLILIES

I know I've told y'all about the day lily collection I look after. Well within a few short weeks the weeds we had previously removed were back and beginning to take over, so Rachel and I spent an entire day weeding the collection. As much as weeding is a dull and torturous task, it felt great to fully clear the area I work in. Below is a picture of just one of the many loads of weeds we removed. 

CHRISTMAS TREES
There is a really cute, small christmas tree plot tucked away here at the garden that contains a couple dozen young trees. They were planted within the season and some failed to establish so Rachel and I were able to plant a couple replacement trees, two beautiful Cedrus deodara. Hopefully these will survive the transplant more successfully. Here is a pretty picture capturing part of the lot. 

HEDGING/PRUNING
A half-day was spent over by our intern house, weeding and cleaning up a bit. Mainly we gave the Magnolia hedge on the side of the house a good trim. Rachel and I had pruned it about a month before this and were very surprised at it's crazy amount of growth in that short month. However, below was our finished product. 

We spent the other half of the day pruning the trees of the formal arboretum as well as dead-wooding (removing dead branches) as we went, within the formal arboretum and within the bay laurel hedge. We also did a good amount of dead-wooding within the garden's small muscadine vineyard. 

SURPRISE IN THE NURSERY

One afternoon Rachel and I set out to help our grower. We fertilized a few beds, collected Phlox cuttings and propagated a very large amount of smaller cuttings from those in the greenhouse. Another task we helped her with was taking inventory of the trees in the nursery. Little did we know those trees were home to a rat snake! He scared us twice in two different trees on different occasions! On our second sighting we were calm enough to snap a picture before running away. 

VEGETABLE GARDEN

I'm sad to admit that before this summer, I had never really worked with vegetables or in a vegetable garden so I was super excited to spend a few days working in there. Of course there is always the given weeding involved in any task, but we were also able to harvest a lot of things and sow some seeds. Lots of cherry tomatoes, peppers, beans and squash were ready for harvest and we planted a few different types of beans in open areas of the beds. We worked a bit on these tasks Monday and came back Friday to finish up and were thrilled to see our beans germinating already! Below is a picture of our baby beans growing and
some of the beans we harvested.

JC RAULSTON ARBORETUM INTERNS
A neat part of our internship experience here is an intern exchange with the JC Raulston Arboretum in Raleigh, NC. This past week the four interns serving at their arboretum this summer came to experience our garden for a couple days. Next week we will be going there for the same amount of time. I love the opportunity it allows us, not only to meet other aspiring professionals in our field but also the exposure to other types of gardens in different areas. I'm excited to see where they work soon! While they were here we worked on many fun things such as planting Magnolias, planting on our green roof, and participating in a grafting lesson. 

• MAGNOLIAS: Near the christmas tree lot was plenty of open space so we decided to put it to good use by planting twenty-five of a new variety of Magnolia. With all six of us working hard we got it done surprisingly fast and we are all excited to watch them grow!

• GREEN ROOF: In the afternoon we received a big shipment of new pretty plants (petunias, lantana, rosemary, butterfly weed, and a few others) mainly to be planted into the green roof to fill in lull spots and add color! It was really neat to work up there and to also aid in the design and placement of plants.

• GRAFTING: The next day we had a really cool opportunity to learn a few grafting techniques from the owner of Mackenzie Farms Nursery, a couple miles down the road. We each made a cleft graft of a chinese apple (scion) onto a pear (rootstock). He also gave us a tour of his place and showed us mature grafts and the benefits of grafting. It was a great learning experience!

FLORAL ARRANGEMENTS

Over the weekend the garden held a class on flower arranging. The owner/designer of a local floral shop, The Lily Pad, came and shared his expertise while we all created a design of flowers we harvested from right here in the Cut Flower garden. It was super fun and interesting, also we got to take our arrangements home.

STAY TUNED
There is a lot planned for the coming weeks so keep following and i'll share it all, Raleigh, bee keeping, JC Raulston Arboretum and more!