Sterile to fertile
I feel obligated to put down memories of how things used to be done. Not that anybody really cares about those things because they’re from the past but I do my best. When I was much younger I worked during four different years in a small greenhouse business. Small is relative because we had seven houses in production. The largest in the city. Immigrants are things that people would buy. A lot of petunia ‘s and tomatoes. And for anyone who’s worked with bedding plants you know that your soil is more important than anything else, except for water. Our soil came in the back of a truck. All we knew is that he had come from a field where there were no cedar trees. Drive is apparently very important or so my boss told me. And my job after breaking up all the clumps was to sterilize the earth. We had a special box about the size of a bed that was heated. Electrically. And I would fill the box loosely and cover it with a sheet of plastic and turn on the heat and wait. Usually for about a day. Warm earth has an order. Not unpleasant but not something you want to have a kitchen table. A couple of days later after everything it cools back down I would take my soil bulk it up with peat Moss and perlite and a certain amount of fertilizer. I would then sift and shovel until the mass had become uniform. And then I would shovel embedding soil into small boxes that could come apart if too much water came in contact. That took the weekend early the next week the owners would fill small boxes with plants thousands and thousands of plants mainly growing from seeds. Petunia’s come in many colours and I learned to tell them apart by the leaves. It’s a trick when you work in a greenhouse to be able to tell the flowers apart long before their flowers. And then we would wait patiently adding water on the regular basis until the plants grew to a height that could entice customers. Carloads of customers. Remember if I did not sterilize the soil none of this would have happened so feel that I have a very important job. I only wish I had photos.
