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!