Mitch Miller
English 0950
Essay #1 final draft
9/30/2013
Prof. Weihe
Cornfusion
It is easy to think that a greenhouse does not do much more then selling plants and watering those plants, this could not be farther from the truth. The spring at a greenhouse is mostly selling plants, but when the later summer comes around there is not much demand for plants anymore, due to the fact that allot of the plants that are sold will die when our aggressive Minnesota winter comes. Before the winter comes a lot of greenhouses will close up shop before the winter usually right around October, or they will look for other ways to make money. The greenhouse that I work at will sell pumpkins, mums, and will host a big event for kids on the weekend until Halloween. About 3 weeks before the fall festival I had just finished up laying 6000 square feet of pavers in refreshing the look of our store, and it was time to start the set up for our fall festival. I learned from accepting responsibility for the corn maze a certain confidence in myself that went deeper than the corn roots themselves. I had no idea how much work it would take to get ready for this event. The biggest attraction at the fall festival would have to be our corn maze. When the corn was no taller than my knees a couple people came to our greenhouse and had a GPS beacon on top of their bobcat. This told them exactly where in the field they would till a pathway and they created an artistic maze in less than a day. The corn would then grow up around where they had tilled.
Everyday up until now I would go into our corn field and turn off the water in two spots and follow 500 feet of hose to an 8 foot tall tower sprinkler. I took the hose off the bottom of the tower and would drudge the big clumsy tower through a 60 foot circular mud mess that it had just created from watering the corn for nearly four hours. I would then look for the driest part of the field and move it further than 100 yards sometimes trying to find the optimal place for it. First dragging the tower then backtracking to the hose and meandering it through the mazes pathways and delicate corn to the newly repositioned tower. I did this every three and a half hours 5 days a week for 2 months, it was not enjoyable. Where the corn was not being watered enough, it would start to turn a light brown color which was ok accept for 1 problem. If so much as a spark were to get to a dry part of the corn field it would ignite like a Christmas tree and would be completely burned up in less than 1 hour. With many people going into the maze it takes a lot of trust as an owner to let them into the maze knowing that if 1 person even lights a cigarette the ashes from it could wipe out all of the profits.
The corn was what was called roundup ready, which meant that it would have weeds growing in it, this was not as described. The pathways that had been tilled up by the bobcat had messed with the chemicals and had started growing weeds. Even some of the chemicals had washed off from the rain and there were weeds growing thick in some small spots of the field. At this point the weeds had grown to be taller than me in many spots. Obviously the families that would be coming would not be able to get through the pathways with the forest of weeds in them. I went out to the field early in the morning one day with just one tool, an old-school weed whacker. If you don’t know what that is it is about a 4 foot handle with a 10 inch metal blade at the end which comes up to the handle in a U. This is considered one of the bad jobs to do at our greenhouse, but I spent 8 hours knocking down weeds like a mad man with a big wide smile on my face. I would swing too hard and wildly sometimes to where I would hit the corn on the sides of the paths and accidently take that down too. The pathways would have to be able to let a stroller roll through them so I would have to clean up the paths to where the roots of the weeds could not be there either.