It takes six months of tending to turn tiny tropical cuttings into the vast drifts of bushy red, white and pink plants that signal the opening of the winter holidays.
At Welby Gardens’ Arvada greenhouse, the work starts in June, when cuttings shipped from South America are shoved into soil and rooted in greenhouses where the heat and humidity are turned up high. After two weeks, the shoots are moved into the green plastic pots they’ll call home until they come to your home.
Until the shoots become big bushy plants, some as tall as 3 feet, they’re looked after by a crew of growers who pinch them back to encourage branching, turn them to make sure they’re beautifully symmetrical, and apply just the right amounts of water and plant food.
The poinsettias are babied until mid-November, when the plants begin to take on color. Right now, 30 people are working with Welby’s poinsettia crop.
“There’s a lot of moving and rehandling and spacing,” says Dan Gerace, a third-generation grower-manager of Welby Gardens. “It does take a lot of attention. If you miss on other crops and they’re not perfect on Mother’s Day, it’s not like they’re not going to sell. If the poinsettias aren’t ready for Christmas, they’re going to go into the trash.”
Welby was out of the poinsettia game for about 30 years, giving up the annual holiday crop to the really big-time Colorado greenhouses, like Color Star Growers in Fort Lupton, where about a half-million poinsettias are grown each season. The Gerace family bought a greenhouse in Arvada four years ago and got sucked back in.
This year, Welby Gardens produced about 30,000 plants, about 70 percent of which are red.
At home, Gerace has three poinsettias, two red and one speckled with white. He’s kind of old-school, that way. “In my opinion, if you’re going to have only one, have a red one.”
Tip: When you’re choosing a poinsettia for home, look closely at the flowers, which are the tiny green balls at the middle of the colored bracts. These should be shiny with not too much yellow pollen showing. If the flowers have dropped off leaving a center of dry white spots at the middle of the bract, the plant is on the way out.
Dana Coffield
