Tens-of-thousands of mums are being donated to schools in and around North Florida. The donations will help the schools with their own fundraising efforts. Tallahassee’s Michele Madison, the founder of Farming the Future, said it began with a text message.
“The owner of SunBlest Gardens in Crawfordville - beautiful operation - sent me a text that said, ‘Hey, man, I got some mums I want to donate to schools. Can you help me out with that?’”
Because Madison teaches farming in several local schools, she texted back: “Sure!”
“How many mums we talkin’? And he responded back with, ‘More mums than you can handle!’”
The total exceeded 25,000, available because they didn’t quite meet the size requirement of a major customer. Madison knew a firm that could help her out.
“Greehouse Megastore.com. They’re the ones that made the whole thing come together and happen, helping with materials for the mums and they’re sponsoring the whole thing and been really great about putting out advertisements and forms to collect information from schools in Florida, Georgia and Alabama.”
Still, Michele Madison is doing a lot of the delivery work herself.
“We’re doing this as we can, so sometimes I’m delivering mums until 11:30 at night. However, we have a lot of mums, so the number one thing is to get the schools to sign up.”
The schools can then sell the mums to finance any initiatives they choose. As the flowers are perishable, Madison said this Friday, Oct. 22, is the cut off for requests.
“They can go to: greenhousemegastore.com/mega-mum-giveaway.”
And if a young lady in bib overalls shows up to drop off the requested blossoms, that would be the aforementioned Michele Madison.
