Our story continues with day 2, and our cuttings are looking good. Over night the cuttings have recovered from the shock and stress of shipping and planting; and are perked up and looking good.
Evidently one of my people sticking the cuttings consistently planted two planting per cell the whole day. The day after planting we have a person go back over all the cuttings to make sure that they were planted correctly and have not fallen over. So while she checked the cuttings she ended up separating out the double plants and sticking them. I plan on watching the line closely tomorrow when our next batch of cuttings arrive.
You can tell by the look on her face that she is very committed to her work. I think she is also ready to kill who ever did the double planting.
Over the weekend we closely monitored the cuttings and gradually increased the time between mistings. Saturday night we were at 36 minutes.
Sunday I did not get to check the mums until late in the afternoon. Fortunately, I have two reliable guys that I depend on greatly on the weekends to watch everything. We went to a small Mexican restaurant after church for lunch. It had started to rain and the sky was darkening so I check the radar on my Treo smart phone. The radar showed a squall line moving into the area. No big deal, we thought. It storms here all the time. We got out drinks and placed our order. While we were sitting there talking, we happened to glance out the window. It looked like a scene from The Weather Channel’s hurricane watch. The wind was blowing so hard that we couldn’t see more that 10-15 feet outside. The funny thing was that there was no sound. We couldn’t hear the wind roaring or anything. It was freaky. Then the lights went out. I pull out my trusty Treo, pulled up the weather site and clicked on the storm warning. According to the warning, we had just been hit with 70-80 mph straight line wind. When we looked out side again we noticed a power line pole leaning. Then we noticed the top of a pole hanging from the power lines. The wind had snapped the tops off three power poles right next to the restaurant. The power lines hung down and blocked the driveway of the restaurant. We ended up stuck there until the power company could get things sorted out and turned off so we could leave. With nothing better to do, we ate lunch in the dark. In the end we only had to wait for about 20 minutes for them to get the power turned off in the hanging lines so we could leave.
We finally got home, I checked the greenhouses and the mums. There was no damage to the greenhouses and the mums were OK. The electricity blinked a couple of time which plays havoc with the automatic watering. I kept having to check the mums every couple of hours.
Sunday night we set the spray interval to one hour. We will probably turn the water off altogether on Monday night.