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The city calls on Seminole Vocational Education Center students to help raise 2,000 trees, keeping the sale at the Green Thumb Festival intact.
By DONNA WINCHESTER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 24, 2002
Featuring more than 180 exhibitors including the Southeast's largest producers of hot peppers, the Green Thumb Festival returns this weekend to Walter Fuller Park, 7891 26th Ave. N.
St. Petersburg's 16th annual Earth Day and Arbor Day celebration will include a children's plant fair, a plant auction and a tool-sharpening clinic. Herbacious flowering perennials and butterfly-attracting plants will be for sale and a dozen varieties of young trees will be priced at $3 each.
The tree sale, a mainstay of the festival, almost was canceled. For years, the city's parks department has grown the trees on land along the east side of Lake Maggiore. Last October, administrators began phasing out the nursery operation because the land was needed to store sediment dredged from the lake.
"We had already ordered our trees for this year. We really had a dilemma," said park operations manager Cliff Footlick.
The city called horticulture instructor Greg Charles to see if his students at Pinellas Technical Education Center could grow the trees. Charles wasn't able to help, so he called Wayne Ackett, an instructor at Seminole Vocational Education Center.
Ackett worked out a deal with the city. The parks department would furnish the trees, the pots and the fertilizer. Fifteen high school students in Ackett's environmental resource management class would provide the labor. They would earn $1 for each tree they turned back to the city, which would benefit the school's environmental program.
Ackett knew from the start that the biggest challenge would be transplanting 2,000 trees from 1-gallon to 3-gallon pots in the limited time he has with his students.
"We aimed for 200 a day," Ackett said. "Every time we were out there, I was teaching them all about the trees, trying to make it an educational experience rather than a forced labor experience."
The students worked with about a dozen varieties, including oak, maple, magnolia, persimmon, crape myrtle and Southern red cedar. The trees had different light and shade requirements, needed varying amounts of water and fertilizer, and grew at different rates. They had to be protected from the cold and shielded from the wind.
The students' diligence produced 2,000 healthy trees that the city will pick up Thursday and transport to the park for this weekend's festival.
"They came through like champs. They saved the day," Footlick said, explaining that a professional nursery would have charged at least twice as much to raise the trees. Without the students' help, the city would not have been able to keep the public's price at $3 per tree.
The school benefited as well, Seminole Vocational Education Center director Matt Fischer said.
"It was a great opportunity for our kids to participate in a partnership with another agency in producing a product that will better the city of St. Petersburg," he said. "We were really excited to participate in that type of project."
The 16th annual Green Thumb Festival, St. Petersburg's Earth Day and Arbor Day celebration, is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday in Walter Fuller Park, 7891 26th Ave. N. The free festival features more than 180 exhibitors and vendors. Highlights include a Garden Club of St. Petersburg flower show competition, a plant diagnostic clinic and seminars on effective landscaping and natural resource conservation.