Poinsettias

Busy, busy! It’s quite early but I have already spent about 30 minutes working on an Excel spreadsheet that calculates the number of poinsettias sold and deducts that number from the amount available…simple stuff, but I’ve been tweaking and formatting for fun!

Yes, I’m in the poinsettia business these days as the Plant Barn is having their annual sale. I’m just an apprentice at it, so I do things like “pull” the plants; taking them from the greenhouses to the point of sale. It’s technical work; you have to know the difference between a “Pink” and a “Shimmer Pink”, plus the darned “Da Vinci” looks a lot like a “Pink” with some exotic plant disease. And they come in various sizes; 4”, 6”, 8” and 10”…the big boys! And expensive!

Besides being expensive, they are fragile; prone to losing stems when being moved. I had to move 50 4” Reds from house #7 to a reserved space in house #8 and although I was only carrying 3 at a time and in a carrying tray…I still lost about 3 stems, with their precious flowers. Although there were 12,000 poinsettias in the greenhouses, each and every one is already promised to some one, so you can’t lose a whole plant.

It’s actually fun…I always enjoy learning something new and I have found that there is lot more to poinsettias than meets the eye. Did you know that they spray the plants with growth inhibitors? If they didn’t, you would be buying poinsettia trees. And when you buy a 10” poinsettia, it didn’t progress from being a 4” plant and transferred to a 6” pot and then to an 8” pot, etc. They all grow in the pot they will be sold in. They are too fragile to be repotted every few weeks.

Pictures to follow…