Hello! My name is Missy Call and I have chosen to blog about my experiences at Blue Grass Lane Annual Flower Trials. So I decided my first post would be about my first couple of weeks of work at Ken Post Laboratory and Blue Grass Lane. For starters, it is definitely the place for you if you enjoy working in greenhouses and gardening. The internship is a lot of hard work and keeps me in shape! There is a lot of planting, weeding, mulching, and watering, among many other things. The job atmosphere is really laid back, which is excellent for the summer, and requires a variety of different tasks so you aren’t doing the same thing every day.

As a brief overview, my job, along with two other interns, is to plant, maintain, and evaluate new cultivars of annual flowers. We receive these cultivars from various breeding companies such as Syngenta, Classic Caladiums, Ball FloraPlant, Ball Ingenuity, Burpee Home and Garden, Keift, PanAmerican Seed, and Proven Winners. Once the beds are finished, we begin to evaluate each plant and score it on how well it is growing in its new environment, here in zone 5. These evaluations are sent back to the breeding companies and reviewed by the researchers and marketers.

Another project we help take care of is the perennial beds, located right next to the annuals. There are six large beds that have already been planted and established, so we spend a lot of our time weeding and mulching these beds.

In the greenhouse we help Professor Bill Miller collect data for research on Lilies and Dahlias. This includes measuring stem and leaf size, time of flowering, and taking photos of the plants. It is always a nice perk to be able to bring the flowers home with us after all of the data has been collected.