Money Does Grow on Plants How to run a school plant sale for a lucrative bloom By Todd Beasley P
ERCEPTIONS OF K–12 school plant sales used to evoke images of straggly seedlings in dixie cups, plant divisions from neighborhood yards in a smorgasbord
of randomly sized pots and containers, and ice-cream-stick plant labels complemented with homemade poster-board signs. In today’s reality, even schools in the beginning stages of a gardening program can readily produce quality specimens for a plant sale with a progressive setup mimick- ing a certified roadside farmers market. With minimum profit margins of at least 80% from
markup percentages as low as 200%, the payback from plant sales equates to a nice slush fund for future campus green- ing initiatives and student-led STEAM academic research projects. The number of schools incorporating horticulture programs into their curricula or as after-school programs is again on the rise after many of these programs were
closed in the late 1980s and early 1990s due to budgetary challenges. As confirmed by The Greenhouse Company in Irmo, South Carolina (SC), many schools are beginning to retrofit older greenhouses into viable learning spaces after many years of neglect or use for random storage. Construc- tion of new institutional and instructional greenhouses for education is also on the rise for the purpose of enhancing curricula by bringing lab experiences alive with real-world connections. Using a greenhouse as an integrating context for STEAM connections through either interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary models is once again successfully captur- ing the attention of teachers and students. After leading profitable 5th -grade-driven plant sales for
10 years at a school in Columbia, SC, the list of cultivated strategies presented here allowed our gross profits to grow from approximately $5,000 in Year 1 to nearly 15,000 annu- ally by Year 10, with the average amount spent by patrons being nearly $70. What follows are some tips for achieving similar success in your community.
Green Teacher 126 Page 41
Photos by Ian Shanahan
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