Chinook FFA Partners with Garden Club to Beautify Main Street

 

May 27, 2020

Upon learning last February that she had received a National FFA Living to Serve grant in the amount of $800.00, Robin Allen, Advisor of the Chinook Chapter of the FFA, set to work with FFA members to make that money grow.

Piggybacking on an order with agriculture education teacher Chad Massar in Jolliet, the process began with purchasing 200 petunia plugs, which arrived in March. These small-sized seedlings were then transplanted into container trays by the Exploratory Ag class and cared for in the Chinook High School greenhouse located north of the school.

While the plants grew, Allen's students prepared for the community engagement aspect of the project: the eventual beautification of Chinook's main drag, Indiana Street. Other locations in town with planters are the Chinook Post Office, Ace Hardware, and Chinook Senior Center.

"Growing the petunias was going to be the plant unit for the junior high students enrolled in Exploratory Ag until COVID-19 revised everyone's plans," Allen reported.

Since school schedules changed drastically shortly after the plugs arrived, most of the work of caring for the plants was left to Allen, who kept a watering and pinching schedule. According to Allen, Dawn Colby, a Chamber of Commerce member who also loves flowers, assisted with the care process, as did several members of Chinook's garden club, Jumping Junipers.

Karen Covert of Jumping Junipers explained that the club officially disbanded but is still loosely organized as more of a social group. "What that means is that we don't have any affiliations with the state and national garden clubs because the forms are cumbersome to complete and no one seemed to want to do that.

"However, we have always partnered with the Chinook Chamber of Commerce in the past to plant and maintain the barrels of flowers that beautify our town, and we wanted to still be a part of that. So, when the Chamber said they could no longer provide the funds for flowers, I approached Robin about how we might work with the school to grow plugs, and she agreed last fall to write a grant to fund the project.

"Robin went above and beyond, not only for the garden club but for the community, since she did most of the work on her own. We stepped in as volunteers on a couple of occasions to help water or to pinch back blooms, a process that encourages a fuller plant; otherwise, petunias get pretty leggy."

Prior to the revisionist tactics imposed by the novel corona virus, the Exploratory Ag class designed Petunia Care Flyers. The class then voted on the design that would eventually be used in packets distributed to business owners who display the planters outside their businesses. Eighth grader Ryley Hofeldt, daughter of Tim Hofeldt, won that contest.

In another of Allen's classes, Ag Design, students created metal flowers from sheet metal to use as centerpieces in the whiskey barrel planters that would line Indiana Street. Only four of those flowers were fabricated before the virus intrusion cut that process short, as well. The Ag Design creations are featured in the four planters on display at the Senior Center.

Joining Allen on May 19, a floral planting crew with a few students gathered to transplant the petunias to their summer homes. Several members of the Jumping Junipers assisted, including Covert, Vicki Niederegger, Linda Sharples, Myrla McCoy, Paulette Cronk, Carol Luckett, Nita Jergeson, and Sherrie Harrold. A subset of that crew met with additional volunteers at the greenhouse at 9:00 a.m. to fill gallon jugs with water and to load them along with the flowers. These were then delivered at planting stations staged around town. Petunia planting commenced at 1:00.

The May 19 date was selected not only to coincide with crew members' schedules but with frost predictions. Calculated using 1981-2010 climate records, the Old Farmer's Almanac placed the average last-frost-date for Chinook as May 21. Other predictions suggested that Chinook's risk of frost typically runs from September 12 through May 18.

Once the planters were complete, Allen and Colby handed out Petunia Care Packets to business owners. These prepared packets not only included Hofeldt's Petunia Care Flyer but a premeasured amount of Miracle-Gro® brand fertilizer that had been purchased at Chinook's Ace Hardware.

"The fertilizer, which can be added to a watering can, will ensure that the flowers get at least one shot of nutrients to survive the summer," Allen explained.

Living to Serve Grants provide an opportunity for FFA chapters to seek funding to support various types of service projects through a competitive application process by identifying a community need that falls within one of four focus areas: community safety; hunger, health and nutrition; environmental responsibility; or community engagement.

 
 

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