... spent in Harris County, when volunteering (again!) my time. This donation of my person was at Callaway Gardens, for their annual spring plant sale. I gave away half of Friday and most of Saturday to be an extra set of hands and feet for a vendor from Roanoke AL who was there with homegrown plants to sell. It was a little different from recent years when I have been up to Callaway to help with plant sales.
When I arrived, there was no particular assignment, no specific job for me on the list of volunteers. I went to be useful, so walked up to someone who was unloading plants and said: "I am here to help, put me to work." She said her name was Suzanna, and that she was a one-woman business. I spent several hours making tags for plants without identifiers, pricing things, rearranging pots on tables, making it appear organized. Business was a bit slow on Friday, but there were a number of folks attending classes with expert speakers. Those people attending the gardening workshops,would come through in clumps, dragging noisy little red wagons they would fill with plants to take home and nurture.
Suzanna reportedly grows most of the plants she sells, with greenhouses on her own property. Starting many of the things either from seeds or cuttings of plants that are already established. I can imagine it to be tiring work, putting in lots of hours that would eventually become exhausting no matter how much you think you enjoy propagating or planting wee little seeds. And once you get started down this path, you have to keep going when you realize you have invested so much time, effort and funding into the project you continue with the far off hope of eventually making a profit. I can see how it would be an endeavor where you feel like you keep digging that hole you are in deeper and deeper?
In years past, the vendors have been assigned spaces under the big circus tent you can see from Highway 27 as you drive north towards Pine Mountain village. The Gardens would expect a percentage of everything vendors sold over the four days of sales. This year, vendors had to rent space and pay an up front fee for their booth. Then handle all the sales to customers, making change and charging tax independently. It seems reasonable to assume that the change would benefit the Gardens financially, but I cannot imagine how just a flat fee for the booth area would improve their income from the event. Most of the manpower that was handling sales in the past when the event was there under the Big Top tent was volunteer labor, people donating their time over several days. I saw many volunteers just sitting around over the two days I was there, people doing nothing but chatting, occupying chairs all day long. Making it obvious they had more people than jobs that needed doing.
I know she was disappointed with the poor sales on Friday, but think she made up for lack of customers and business by the volume today. I don't know how much she sold, as I declined to handle any of her money (plus many were paying with cards/plastic) though I have the sense that today was a good day during which she sold many of her larger/higher priced pots. She was going home overnight and returning Sunday morning with more things people were inquiring about, and will hopefully feel like the weekend was a success. I heard her say she was going to shows/sales nearly every week for the next couple of months. Making me very thankful I am not self-employed!
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