Thursday, May. 23, 2002 – 11:37 a.m.
2002-05-23 11:37
Class Prep
Tonight I teach the rose class again; it is a practice for teaching it NEXT weekend at Summer University. I taught it last fall at Atlantian Fall University and I had intended to update it for the next iteration. Right… Update it…
So there I was at midnight last night, rewriting my notes and updating some of the pictures in the handout. Can you say Mr. Procastination? I knew you could… I got the notes typed in (I remembered when I was looking for the folder from last fall that I had handwritten my notes… sitting in the hotel room …at 2am …. the night before the class.) So now they are typed and revised. That is a step forward.. Notes done, on to the handout…
There were two things about the handout that I needed to revise. One was I wanted to use any of my own pictures that I could. As it was, the only period rose that I have actually photographed (and identified … there may actually be some other photos of period roses but I just know know what the variety is) is The Apothacary Rose (R. gallica officialis). The other thing that had been missing from the last handout were picture credits. So here I am, with my stack of rose books, frantically trying to figure out which book I scanned that picture from. As it was, it really was only two books: Botanica’s Roses and Peter Beales’ Classic Roses. That done, I realized that I needed to check the URLs that I had listed to make sure they still worked. Good thing I did so… one of the address was no longer good (I replaced it with the URL of a related organization.) and I needed to add a plug for MY rose pages: Roses and My Garden.
Finally it was time to update the annotate bibliography with all the books I had read about roses since last fall. About 3am, after adding about a half dozen entries, I decided that I would just add the rest for the class NEXT week. BED TIME!!
Spraying
I checked and found my neem oil spray. Reading the label, it didn’t seem like it had that much of the active ingredient in it. I really wanted to get it on the rose since I would be Sunday before I would get another shot. Rather than use the hand sprayer, I decided to use the Otho Dial-n-Spray that attaches to the hose. This is faster because it does not require measuring and mixing. So I pour the concentrate in the bottle and screw it on the sprayer, set the dial at “3 oz”, and started spraying (Oh, I had done the usual safety precausions of a respirator, long sleave cloths, goggles, and gloves.)
Well, I think I will take the time to do a tank mix next time… About 3/4 of the way through, I had used up most of the 16 ounces that I had. That was a quick $13 that I went through.
Ok, so what I really need to do is mix my OWN using concentrated neem oil. I need to check the different websites to see where I can order it from.