(EDITOR’S NOTE: A graphic about poinsettias is on the web at http://agnews.tamu.edu/graphics/newsgraph/HORT/poincare.htm)
COLLEGE STATION — To grow poinsettias for the very narrow, once- a-year holiday marketing window, it can take a lot of class. A class of university students that is.
What better plant could students in a fall greenhouse management course learn from than poinsettias, asks assistant professor and Texas Agricultural Experiment Station horticulturist Dr. Harvey Lang.
More than 60 students in Lang’s greenhouse class at Texas A&M University are coaxing two varieties of poinsettias toward maturity and an A’ for amazing or maybe anxious as the semester winds down before Christmas.
“With poinsettias, you have a certain date for production, and you have to hit it as close as possible or people won’t buy,” said Texas A&M senior horticulture major Chad Bellar of Jacksonville.
“There’s money in it, but it’s a challenge, too,” he added. “I like a competitive challenge — one wrong move and it’s all yours.”
Growers in the United States annually send almost 62 million poinsettias to market during the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. More than 90 growers in Texas will supply about 3.3 million potted poinsettias this year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Bellar and many of the other students in the greenhouse management course hope to become commercial nursery owners who produce plants, such as poinsettias, for home and garden. Lang said having them produce a crop for the course teaches them the practical side of the industry firsthand.
“This teaches them all aspects of working in a greenhouse, from heating and cooling to the types of structures, potting medium, fertilizer and how to water,” Lang noted. He said two particular types of poinsettias were chosen for the students to grow this year because they are varieties less susceptible to bract edge burn, a condition which causes the bracts to dry around the edges when under environmental stress such as cold December air.
For Bellar and the four students in his group charged with growing about 12 poinsettias, tending to the plants is more tedious than the usual papers assigned in other college courses.
“Each of us are in control of watering the plants, so we may just stop by the greenhouses on the way to another class,” Bellar said. “We also use that time to check for diseases or if the plants are getting too much water. At first we had trouble with plants rooting, so ours will be a little smaller.”
Growing the poinsettias has shown the students the scientific side of something that the typical consumer accepts as a simple, though beautiful, plant.
“The poinsettia needs a certain number of hours to flower, and you can regulate that by pulling black cloth over it,” Bellar said. “It’s important to check for deficiencies all the time and to monitor the growth. It’s very technical.”
He said the target is 14-18 inches tall, so his group measures their poinsettias weekly to get precise growth on schedule. Too much or too little growth would call for additional treatment, he said, to slow or hasten the process.
“If you don’t hit it right (in the commercial setting), you are gone,” said Bellar, who took a mature plant home to his mother at Thanksgiving. “This class has helped me so much to learn the scientific side of how production occurs and how to be successful.”
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