Australian and New Zealand Gardening: OUR BROMELIADS INTO 2015.. , 3 by splinter1804

splinter1804 wrote:
Hi everyone – Not much doing here yesterday except getting plants ready for the plant sales next Saturday. It’s at times like this that I pay the price for not using any insecticides as I’m spending many tedious hours cleaning cobwebs out of the leaf axils of the plants I’m taking to the sale.

I find the easiest way is to get a small paintbrush of the round type artist’s use, and for this job it’s about a centimetre in diameter. I just put it down into the leaf axil and start turning it in a clockwise direction (any direction would do). This winds the cobwebs onto the brush bristles and makes them easy to remove without damaging the plant or getting your hand tangled up in prickles.

Once they are all on the brush, it’s a simple matter to hold the web and the brush bristles firmly between two fingers and just wriggle and pull the brush away from them leaving you holding the wound up web between your fingers. It does a good job and saves a lot of pricks in your fingers from the leaves.

The plants then all have to be priced and the system we use is to put a price sticker on a leaf as well as a “paddle pop” stick in the pot with the price and the seller’s initials. The sticker is so the buyer can quickly and easily identify the price of the plants and not have to go pulling out labels looking for it elsewhere.

The “paddle pop” stick is for the use of the sellers; who take it out of the pot and put in a partitioned box with a grower’s name on each partition. As we sometimes have plants from up to a dozen different growers, this makes the seller’s job much easier when working out who sold what. It is the same system we have used at our shows for many years and it works well.

Trish – Taking a day off from your annual leave wouldn’t have been tolerated by fellow workers when I worked at the steelworks many years ago as it was common knowledge that’s what “sickies” were for; Ha! Ha! ........ You're just too honest……………… Anyway, I hope you enjoyed your very short holiday .

Time to go, and the pic’s today are my own hybrids all bred from the same seed parent which was an unusual variegated sport from Neo. 'Painted Lady'.

All the best, Nev.