Hello!
Almost two weeks have passed. There has been some new jobs: I have been working at the potting machine and planting seedling for the early spring market, and watering plants in the tunnels and in the shop. I have become pretty independent in my tasks, which is nice.
This place is a school. There are students of different ages and levels starting from youngsters of the third grade in high school (it takes 4 years in France) and those at the basic level of the professional college to young adults doing a two year extra course after the basic education. I have had the opportunity to work also with various classes doing different jobs under the supervision of their teachers. It has been very interesting to follow the teaching, and the students working. One time, for instance, the teacher explained the principles of watering and showed very precisely how it should be done. And then every student had a little parcel to water, and everybody followed attentively. It was interesting for me too to watch and learn!
As an extra treat, I have had the opportunity to take part at two floristry lessons. We made vertical arrangements in a sponge with three different dahlia-flowers: one big, three medium-sized and five small ones. The principles were, of course, but the working was very different. Where we, there back home, are given very free hands to create our own vision of the work in hand, here we had to follow instructions very stricktly. The aim was to produce ten or twelve exactly similar arrangements, only changing the choice of flowers used. We didn’t, of course, quite succeed It was really interesting and nice, and it was, actually, quite a difficult task to choose the flowers among 300 different varieties so that they would match nicely together and behave like wanted in the arrangement.
Tomorrow I’ll be off with the extra course students to visit the Ernest Turc enterprise, a big producer of different kinds of plant material, at least seeds and bulbs. They have, for instance, created the dahlia Normandie.