MOUNT VERNON — The Knox County Career Center campus is vibrant with color this spring as the horticulture program students landscape the campus with flowering plants.
A new project is also in the works: The planting of 4,000 red, white and blue wave petunias along all the walkways and roadways on the campus. The planting sequence is two blue petunias, one red and one white.
“This year we had construction to deal with,” said Craig Campbell, horticulture lab instructor, “but we’ll expand this next year, and we’re going to try to plant these [new beds] every year.”
KCCC students did all the work, from cutting sod and rototilling the soil six times to nurturing tiny petunia plugs and planting the mature plants in the ground.
Wave petunias were chosen, said Campbell, because “they really spread and they take less maintenance.”
“We’ll probably pinch them back just before school ends, but that’s all the maintenance they’ll get,” he said.
With most of the program’s seniors placed in work assignments, Career Based Intervention students were recruited to help plant.
“It’s fun,” said sophomore Bailey Reed. “I get to work with my hands and my friends, and be outside and enjoy the weather.”
Horticulture program senior Collin Brill, who will attend Hocking College this fall and study to be a forester, said, “It’s fun, really fun. Because you get to be outside all day. And you also get a tan.”
Sophomore Chase Hatcher, who was also planting petunias, said he has been accepted into the horticulture program for next year, and that his grandmother and great-grandmother are happy about that.
“They want me to plant all their flowers for them,” said Hatcher.
Hatcher added that his great-grandmother, Zelda Salyer, 95, used to win prizes for her gardening projects at the Centerburg Oldtime Farming Festival, so he suspects he may have inherited his green thumb from her.
