Table of Contents
The greenhouse at the Hermitage High School ACE center was mostly empty on the morning of Dec. 9. For months, students had been growing poinsettias – watering them in the warm environment of the greenhouse, making sure they had enough shade, and finally, wrapping them in bright red foil and selling them at their annual holiday plant sale.
At the ACE center’s two-day holiday-themed event Thursday and Friday, students sold plants they had grown during horticulture and landscaping programs at the school, including foil-wrapped poinsettias and pansies, as well as evergreen wreaths and centerpieces that customers could pre-order.
By the second day of the sale, almost all the flowers had already been sold.
The Hermitage ACE center’s Greenhouse Management and Horticulture Science program uses plant sales throughout the year as a way to introduce students to the marketing side of plant production. Students also learn how to grow and propagate plants in the school’s greenhouses, as well as how to make floral arrangements and “plantscaping.”
Students in the horticulture program spend many of their days working with plants in the greenhouse. They also learn about general design elements and business skills. Students in the landscaping program also learn how to safely use machinery such as leaf blowers, tillers and riding lawn mowers.
According to the class’s teaching assistant, Miranda Rapp, many of the students in the horticulture program are exceptional education students. The plant sale is an opportunity for many of these students to develop social and customer service skills.
“It also helps their social skills, because a lot of our kids have IEPs,” Rapp said. “Some of them need to learn how to have a conversation with people, how to greet people. Some of our students are not in exceptional education, and they are great helpers to the other kids.”
Proceeds from the plant sales go toward opportunities for the class, such as field trips and sending students to the Future Farmers of America leadership conference, according to Hermitage ACE Center Associate Principal Debra Bishop,
“We’re basically trying to provide a service to the community, and raise enough funds so that students can have a breadth of opportunities that they may not have otherwise,” Bishop said.
A spring sale later in the school year will give the students an opportunity to market their vegetables, some of which are currently growing in outdoor planters, along with many more types of flowers. Unlike the poinsettias, which were purchased as tiny plants, almost everything the students grow for the spring sale is from a seed.
“We’re going to have a ton of different flowers, annuals, perennials, snapdragons, some others.” Rapp said. “We sell vegetables too – peppers, tomato plants, it depends. Sometimes we have six different varieties of tomatoes that we sell.”
Students in the horticulture program also have opportunities to visit locations in the community. On a recent trip to Strange’s Florists, Greenhouses & Garden Centers, junior student Pursell Moore even bought his own plants, which he grows at home as a side project.
“I picked up a green thumb,” Moore said. “I always wanted to get into planting stuff and growing stuff, so I thought I should join this group. I applied to the ACE center and it just took off from there.”
Moore said that a typical day in the horticulture class involves working outside, watering and planting, and “having fun.” The poinsettias took about two months to grow and needed a lot of shade.
“You had to make it really dark for them so they could grow,” Moore said. “We take the black tarp down every morning and then put it back up at the end of the day, then we do it again the next day.”
The pansies, in contrast, were much less intensive to grow.
“Those ones thrive in the cold, so we just leave them outside and water them sometimes,” Moore said.
Currently, the Hermitage ACE center is being renovated – meaning that the classroom adjacent to the greenhouse is currently out of commission. The horticulture students currently are using a temporary classroom while theirs is being renovated. Bishop hopes that the classroom will be finished in March, allowing students more access to the greenhouse.
* * *
Anya Sczerzenie is the Henrico Citizen’s education reporter and a Report for America corps member. Make a tax-deductible donation to support her work, and RFA will match it dollar for dollar. Sign up here for her free weekly education newsletter.
