Horticultural Nursery Assistants
Assist in propagating, cultivating and harvesting plants in a horticultural nursery. May also assist in propagating and cultivating plants for forestry purposes.
A hot morning in the shadehouse
You are a nursery assistant, moving between watering, potting, order picking and checking plants through the day. It is 7am and the forecast is for a very hot day. There are three trade orders to pick, a bench of seedlings that needs potting on, and the misting system has been temperamental.
Choose what you would do. Then see what happens. There are often good reasons for each choice.
The thermometer in the shadehouse is already high and it's only seven. The seedlings on bench four look limp. I need you to deal with it while I sort the orders. What are you going to do?
Water the seedlings heavily to cool them down and hope they recover
The roots sit in soggy mix in the heat, and several seedlings flop within the hour. Too much water in heat can do as much harm as too little. A look at the plants and the mix first would have helped.
Check the misters and shade cloth, then tell Nick what you find
You find a blocked mister and a gap in the shade cloth, fix both and tell Nick. The seedlings perk up by mid-morning. Looking at the cause is better than guessing at a cure.
Move the trays to a cooler spot and carry on with your orders
The seedlings are better off, but the blocked mister and the gap in the shade cloth are still there, and the problem returns the next day. Moving trays helps for now, but the system still needs repair.
I ordered forty of the tall variety and these look shorter than I wanted. Do you have more of the tall ones? I need to leave in ten minutes, and I'll take whatever you've got.
Say the pots are the same variety and send him off
He leaves, but when he plants the shrubs they stay compact and the job doesn't look as he planned. You didn't lie, but you didn't check either. A customer needs the plant they asked for.
Fill the order with whatever matches roughly, to avoid a fuss
Wen finds out when the plants arrive on site and rings the nursery, angry. The nursery has to replace the order and offers a discount. A rough match is a promise that is not kept.
Check the bench and tell him what you do have
You find twenty tall ones and the rest are shorter. Wen takes the twenty and orders the rest for later. The honest answer gave him what he needed. Customers remember the nursery that tells them the truth.
I think there are tiny bugs on the undersides of these leaves. They're on a few of the plants that are in tomorrow's order. Do I just brush them off?
Move the affected plants aside, show Nick and swap them in the order
Nick looks closely and confirms it. The plants are isolated from the others and the order goes out clean. Spotting the pests early saved the nursery, and its customers, from a spread.
Tell her to brush them off and load the plants as planned
The bugs are still there when the plants reach the customer's nursery, and spread through their stock. Tiny pests travel easily on plants.
Tell her to leave them, and say nothing in case it causes trouble
The bugs spread to the next bench over the weekend. By Monday Nick has a bigger problem. Quiet worry is fine, but pests need action, and speed matters.
How it went
The orders go out, the seedlings recover and the shadehouse smells of damp leaves. Nursery work is practical and patient, and it asks you to notice small changes in living things before they turn into big ones. Could you enjoy helping thousands of plants get a good start?
This is a simplified, fictional situation to help you explore. It is not professional instruction or a test of your ability.
Case study: The labels that did not match
A fictional case set in a wholesale plant nursery with shadehouses, misting beds and a loading dock for trade orders.
The situation
Aisha was a nursery assistant at a wholesale plant nursery. On a Tuesday morning she was helping to load a big order of flowering shrubs for a landscaper. As she lifted a tray she noticed that the label said one variety, but the flowers on two of the plants were a different colour from the picture. The loading dock supervisor, Nick, was shouting that the truck was due in five minutes.
What they did
Aisha stopped loading and showed Nick the tray and the label. She did not guess which one was right, and asked him to check the batch record. Nick pulled out the paperwork and saw that a bench of cuttings had been mixed up in the shadehouse the week before. They set that tray aside, checked the rest of the order and swapped in the right plants from another bench.
How it turned out
The truck left fifteen minutes late with the right plants. The landscaper never knew there had been a mix-up. Nick asked the team to check one plant against its label at the start of every loading job, and Aisha was asked to show the new casual how to do it.
What would you do?
- Would you have said something with the truck about to arrive?
- Why might it be better to tell someone than to fix the label yourself?
- What clues helped Aisha notice the difference?