The FFA program here at PHS is holding a plant sale to raise money for travel, meetings, and supplies. The sale will open to the public on the 23rd of April through Friday the 25th, from 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. It will also be open on the 26th, but the hours will be different: 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Miss Carr, Miss Lambert, and several students are preparing for the sale as they take care of the plants, watering them, arranging them in baskets, creating terrariums, etc.
“We have flowering annuals, foliage plants, vegetables, herbs, medicinal plants, and house plants,” Miss Lambert said.
The FFA gets its plants from plugs or suppliers that sell seeds. The seeds are repotted from trays into pots by students, they are then rearranged and organized in both greenhouses. The reason why scholars often participate in doing so is because they are enrolled in a class, such as Agriculture, Foods and Natural Resources, Animal Science, Plant Science, etc.
These classes require SAE (Supervised Agricultural Experience) projects to pass the class, and working in the greenhouse after school provides them with the necessary hours needed for the project.
The vast kinds of plants allow for creativity to bloom and be admired, providing students in agriculture classes with the resources to make plenty of arrangements for the holidays and or seasons.
“We do subscription services, which is every semester, and those are floral arrangements; we also do them on Valentine’s Day, for Christmas, and Thanksgiving,” Miss Lambert said. “We sometimes do flower arrangements on Mother’s Day; it all really depends on what the floral teacher wants to do.”
Miss Carr, the long term substitute for Miss Smith, has been in the plant industry for years, and she believes that based on the selection of products available for the plant sale, the trailing sweet potato vine, the petunias, the impatiens, and the vegetable plants will sell out the quickest, and Miss Carr provides her reason for why.
“Well, in the flower shop, plants like the blooming flowers that people can give as a gift, those sell the best,” Miss Carr explained. “But annual bedding plants…sell the best too.”
Mr. Jim Neeway, a coach who is interested in buying from the plant sale, gave his insight on why he takes an interest in the plant sale.
“As human beings evolved from hunter-gatherers to fixed habitations, the main driver for that was the learned ability to harvest crops from plants,” Neeway said. “That very human part of us has been passed down from generations, so there is still this desire from humans to harvest plants, whether or not they are ornamental or for food. So every human being will have that desire, whether they learn it or not, so the opportunity to purchase plants from a group of young horticulturalists is too good to pass up.”
