Thursday, May 12, 2015 – Bedding plants

The bedding plants arrived! This morning at about 9:00 AM trucks from FM in Nauvoo started to arrive. I was mowing at the visitor’s center at the time so I stopped to help unload the trucks full of bedding plants. I estimated that they brought over two thousand bedding plants with them!

Besides Sis. Johnson and I, there were an additional 8 other seniors to help plant the bedding plants. Richard, the horticulturist from FM, coordinated all of the workers. He made assignments so everyone worked together like a well oiled machine.  We started by planting the flower beds first.  When we finished the flower beds we started on the terracotta containers that line the sidewalks. There were 50 of them to plant. I had no idea there would be so many large containers lining the sidewalks.

It was a lot of back breaking work but the flower beds and the terracotta containers all look great. As the weather gets warmer and the plants grow, the flower beds and the containers of plants will all fill in nicely. They will look even better than they do now. After putting away and cleaning everything up, Sis. Johnson and I finished working at 4:00PM. Even though it was a long hard day, it was very satisfying to see everything finished.

 

The greenhouses at FM have been in full production all winter and spring preparing for all of the flower beds and planting required for Nauvoo as well as here in Carthage. Richard said this year they planted twenty thousand flower pots from seed. They planted three thousand pots from cuttings they harvested themselves. They also purchased seven thousand “Plugs” and transferred them into pots to grow and mature. That’s a lot of plants to use throughout Nauvoo. They will need them all, there are about 250 flower beds that will need to be planted this spring.