21 December 2, 2009
The temperatures are still relatively mild. In many ways, it seems more like early spring than early winter. However, I’m not holding out hope that spring is just around the corner. We’ll leave that to the groundhog at the appropriate time!
I try not to climb up on a soapbox, but a photo in Saturday’s Daily News made me shake my head. The picture showed a woman leaving a large retail store on Friday. In her shopping cart was a large poinsettia. The poinsettia was not wrapped up in a plant sleeve. The rain, wind and cold weather were buffeting the plant. Poinsettias are a tropical plant. Exposure to even short periods of cold temperatures and or windy conditions can damage the plant. Once the woman gets that poinsettia home, the leaves will begin to drop and the plant will be on its way to dying from that exposure to cold weather. In my mind, if any store is going to sell poinsettias, the plant should be properly sleeved up before it leaves the store. Plant sleeves are not that expensive an item to buy. In our store, we don’t let poinsettias leave the store without being properly covered. By not sleeving that poinsettia, that store shows that they don’t care about the survival of the plants that they sell. Sure, they will take the plant back if it dies. But, they just charge back the sale to the plant grower who must refund the price to the store. It is part of the deal when selling plants to the box stores. For that reason, the box store really doesn’t have to care if the plant survives or not.
It seems to come up each year at about this time of the season. Someone will come into the store and look at poinsettias and will tell me. “ I would really like to have a poinsettia, but since they are poisonous to children, I don’t want to have one in the house.” Poinsettias are not poisonous plants that cause kids to die. That story has made the rounds for years. There are no documented cases of children eating poinsettia leaves and then dying from eating those leaves. If you have children in your home and you want to have a poinsettia or two in the house, don’t worry about the urban legend of poinsettias being a deadly plant for children.
Well, that’s all for this week. I’ll talk to you again next week.