Sorry I've been MIA lately. The beginning of my second year of college is proving to be much more busy than I expected it to be. My excursions into horticulture are much different than they were last year, and this, along with my other classes and extra curriculars, have been keeping me on fast forward for the past three weeks. On top of my course work, every Saturday for all three weeks of the semester so far has been a football game which I'm required to rehearse for and play at for marching band. Needless to say, I've had few breaks.
The little break I have now before tomorrow's football game is the little window of time I've found to write.
Like I said before, this semester's horticulture courses are nothing like last semester. Instead of work in the greenhouse, this class is completely plant identification. Our labs consist of excursions outside around campus, learning the Latin and common names of plants. We then have to memorize these names and are quizzed every week. It's pretty tough work, but I've managed to get by pretty well so far. We have midterms next week already, so we'll see how the 20 plant identification goes. Thankfully the class is broken into sections and the final exam isn't cumulative. Instead, it's broken into herbaceous plants and woody plants, with another section that hasn't been quite determined yet for once it's to cold and snowy out for identifying plants outside to be effective.
The one setback to my year so far has been my other requirements to the horticulture major, algebra in particular. I've never been very good at math, so college algebra, a class I'm required to take to enter into the college that offers the horticulture major, has been very difficult for me. Chemistry is going somewhat better, but it's a hard class to keep track of with everything else happening.
With that update, I'll leave you with some pictures of the plants we've been identifying in class.
