On May 1, the HNH team spent the afternoon completing an assessment of Rosmarie’s garden. During this training session, staff discussed what they look for when caring for your garden and the strategies that they use to ensure the HNH philosophy is consistently used from landscape to landscape. One of the techniques that we focused on was edging, such an easy skill that makes a big difference. The photo is of Rosmarie showing the Angle of Repose.
The Angle of Repose of mulch is the steepest angle of descent of the slope relative to the horizontal plane when material on the slope face is on the verge of sliding: this angle is in the range of 60°.When bulk granular materials are poured onto a horizontal surface, a conical pile will form. The internal angle between the surface of the pile and the horizontal surface is known as the angle of repose and is related to the density, surface area and shapes of the particles, and the coefficient of friction of the material. Wikipedia
When mulch is piled and packed, it will pack to an angle of 60° before it will start to slide and fall into the trench that is made by the edger. The edger (straight nosed shovel) makes a straight down vertical cut that is 90° to the horizontal plane. So, when our gardeners have completed the edging tasks, we will clearly see a straight down 90° with the mulch being at a 60°; this is part of our HNH brand.
The second part of our afternoon was spent reviewing pertinent sections of our new Occupational Health and Safety Manual. This is a very exciting time for HNH, the implementation of the new manual means that we are one step closer to receiving our Letter of Recognition from the Nova Scotia Construction Safety Association and most importantly that our staff are delivering our brand in a safe and consistent manner.