Rainier FFA chapter set to host annual plant sale this Thursday through Saturday

With the beautiful stretch of weather forecasted ahead, what better way to celebrate the sunny conditions than by swinging by Rainier High School for its FFA chapter’s annual plant sale — which is set for Thursday, April 30, through Saturday, May 2.

Specifically, the sale will take place from 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 30, and Friday, May 1. Hours will stretch out to span from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, May 1.

Angie Karnes, Rainier FFA advisor, told the Nisqually Valley News on Monday, April 27, that you can find the plant sale at RHS behind Rainier City Pizza and Burgers. Proceeds from the event will benefit members of the chapter in numerous ways, such as paying for half of the fee to attend the FFA state convention.

Karnes, who has been with Rainier FFA for over 30 years, said the sale will include a variety of plants and items such as vegetables, perennials and annuals like petunias and geraniums. You can see the full variety of plants later this week at the two greenhouses.
Since COVID-19 swept the globe in 2020, Karnes said RHS FFA has presented the plant sale in both an online format and an in-person format. She believes this prepares her students for the work force after they graduate.

“That way, our students can learn how to fill orders and do drive-ups,” she said. “That, now, has become a thing for people that shop at Walmart or Safeway and stores like that. You can order online and pick things up. I figured that if we did both, our students are learning two sets of skills.”

Karnes said the FFA chapter completed the online portion of the sale on Thursday, April 23, and Friday, April 24, and 55 orders were handed out during the first round of plant pickup on Monday, April 27. The final plant pickup date took place on Wednesday, April 29 and over 20 orders were fulfilled.

“My biggest goal for the in-person sale is to sell out,” Karnes said. “I don’t know that we will do that. We never have totally sold out of plants. We also run the community garden here in Rainier, so we do take leftover veggies and that’s how we start our community garden. It’s not like we don’t have a use for the plants that we have leftover.”

Additionally, flower baskets and bowls will be arranged with the remaining flowers. Karnes specified that those will be taken to the Thurston County Fairgrounds as members of her FFA chapter are set to sell their animals there later this year.

“It’s great if we sell out, but bottom line, we run these classes at our schools — they’re career and technical education classes — and we’re really trying to teach them job skills and life skills,” she said. “In my landscape classes, they keep a timesheet. They record what jobs they do. We do rotational jobs so they experience everything, both in the greenhouses and out in the actual landscape and in the gardens.”

Karnes added that each of the two greenhouses “smells amazing” upon entry. They said that smell directly correlates to the hard work that her landscape students have poured into this project in preparation for the sale.

“I think this is the best growing season for our plant sale ever,” Karnes said. “We added a new greenhouse in 2011, and we kind of doubled what we could do. This year, instead of one landscape class, I have two. I have twice as many students, and we’ve really stepped up. They’ve done a great job. Things are green, happy, growing and flowering. We have to duck to walk through the greenhouse because we have so many baskets.”

If the Rainier FFA chapter is able to make a profit from the plant sale event, the money raised will be utilized for several different things. The biggest purpose of the plant sale, Karnes said, is to help offset student costs of attending the FFA state convention in Pullman.

She noted that funds raised at this plant sale will pay for half of each students’ cost to attend the convention.

Additionally, she believes the preparation for the sale, and the event itself, is a great way to prepare Rainier students to become good employees in the future.

“Most people don’t leave high school and become a boss right away,” she said. “They’re going to work for someone. They’re learning how to work with someone, work with others, how to communicate, how to be flexible and how to adapt to change. We really work on that throughout the growing season.”