Palmer Home for Children’s 11 greenhouses on the Columbus campus are adorned in festive red, each filled with hundreds of poinsettias grown for the Christmas season. In all, they total 3,700 plants available for purchase for everything from a thoughtful gift to sanctuary decor. The major fundraiser helps provide a nurturing, Christian residential environment for children.
“This was just dirt when we put it in here,” said 15-year-old Carl, lifting up one of the full, showy plants in its 6 1/2-inch pot. He’s one in the team of teens who have tended the poinsettias that first arrived in mid-August as cuttings only a few inches long. Palmer Home Greenhouse and Garden Manager Mary Tuggle oversees the operation that teaches the students not only horticulture, but responsibility, too.
“It good for learning patience and commitment,” said Trip, 15. He’s up soon after 5 a.m. every morning to join other helpers in pulling back long, black plastic covers that cloak the plants every night from street and car lights, for best development.
“Starting around the first of October, they’re shaded for eight weeks, from dark to daylight,” Tuggle explained. “The students have to be here every night and every morning at dark-thirty, seven days a week. They take ownership: It teaches them team work, job skills, to be on time, to follow up — it’s life skills.”
All the diligent control of light, water, fertilizer and air circulation has produced the mass of poinsettias available at Palmer Home’s Hope Grows greenhouses near the corner of Ninth Street South and 11th Avenue South between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, or online at palmerhome.org/poinsettias/. Plants are $18 each, available in a choice of gold or moss green foil.
“We can deliver to any site within a 120-mile radius of Palmer Home’s Columbus campus with a purchase of five or more plants to a single location,” Tuggle said. “If you want a dedicated delivery, we’d like to have the order by Thanksgiving so I can plug it in while a truck’s going that way.”
Free deliveries may be requested for the weeks of Nov. 27-Dec. 1, Dec. 4-8 or Dec. 11-15.
For more information, visit palmerhome.org/poinsettias/ or contact Palmer Home at 855-672-5637.
Jan Swoope is the Lifestyles Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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