Best Plant Sale Yet!

Last Saturday, the Solstice P-Patch hosted its most profitable plant sale yet! With an approximate profit of $2300.00, we exceeded our expectations. As with many of our efforts, this success came from a strong collective effort, lessons learned from prior years, and a willingness to experiment and try new strategies.

Tree and shrub set up.

Bess organizes the veggies!

Hundreds of perennials!

A beautiful book table.

Original plant sale signage!

Lots of plants!

Tents covered checkout tables.

Close-up of the veggies.

A table of fruit plants.

A project like this is many months in the making, and in this case, the months added up to over a year! Since we were not able to hold a spring plant sale in 2020, some of the plants that our gardeners donated were saved and tended to for this year's plant sale. Several gardeners raised many vegetable starts from seed -- and those veggie starts went fast. Our P-Patch gardeners also donated hundreds of plants from their own gardens. More recently, a plant sale planning committee was formed a couple months ago to guide the effort and share the workload. You may remember reading about a work party to create signage for the sale too. Some of our youngest gardeners created signs, spread the word, and even prepared chicken eggs for sale! But one thing really stood out that stood out to me this time was the support we received from community members - friends of P-Patch gardeners - who donated plants, lent tables, or spent their time to help us set up and run the sale.

We benefitted greatly from having gardeners with prior experience running and supporting plant sales. They were able to adapt previous sale plans to current health guidelines. It simply would not have been possible without their gardening expertise and the well-tended plants they donated. Many of our shoppers were impressed and surprised by the variety and quality of the plants they found at our sale.

There were many unknowns going into this plant sale - perhaps most importantly, with the West Seattle Garage Sale cancelled again this year, we weren't sure that we would be able to garner enough attention. As a result, we experimented with an informal grassroots digital advertising campaign, armed with a digital flyer (thanks Winston!) that we shared on social media and on the West Seattle Blog. One of our newest gardeners had the excellent idea of using Twitter to share photos of our sale with the West Seattle Blog as we wrapped up our set up. On the gardening side, we experimented with purchasing and growing native plants from bare root. These plants sold especially well. We also collected gardening books, pots, and baskets to sell this time around.

When we set out to run the plant sale this year, we had some doubts about the potential outcome. Luckily, we had enough optimism to hold the sale, and those doubts fueled a lot of hard work, excellent teamwork, and some creative problem-solving. Definitely P-Patch community work at its finest!