Department: Prop.
Started the day helping out with Plant Reception, one of the coldframes had flooded with the overnight heavy rain, so we moved the plants out of there to a drier spot. There was a van full of hellebores gifted from somewhere. A staff member had driven the van so fast, the trolleys and plants had fallen against the van door, it took four people to finally lift the van door up (it was one of the roller ones), some had come out of their pots, but everything was salvageable.
I missed Katie's talk on pots so she gave us a snapshot of it - 500 million plastic pots go into landfill per year, plastic is said to take over 400 years to break down. NISP - http://www.orbuk.org.uk/article/the-national-industrial-symbiosis-programme-nisp encouraged garden centres to set up recycling schemes. Plastic is a combination of polypropylene and polystyrene, so this makes it very complicated to recycle. Katie did a masters on researching a prototype pot that is made of 100% polypropylene on behalf of a large nursery business that cannot be named. It's working name is pot with air pruning capabilities - they were square and had holes in it. 20% more plants can be fitted onto a danish trolley in square pots than in a round pot and they fitted potting machines also. She conducted a experiment in prop growing Spiraea and Penstemon in different kinds of pots. The growing medium was a peat and bark based one. An automatic drip feed irrigation system was set up for them. She measured things like how many stems they produced, size of plant, how much flowers they produced etc. She looked at the root system - a tip for good comparison - take an example of a bad root and a good root system - put comparative ones either side to get a sense of good or bad. Her conclusion for the experiment was that the plants in square pots, the quality was not as good as round pots. Though they were recyclable, they were not necessarily that sustainable either, which was also the point of their production just because they required a higher amount of irrigation.
Then I did more pinching out of tender perennials.