Santa Rosa Junior College greenhouse, nursery offers room to grow

Set down a driveway off a parking lot on the north side of Santa Rosa Junior College is one of better-kept secrets.

It’s a 1,200-square-foot greenhouse that wraps around a courtyard filled with tables laden with plants. This is where many of the nursery and landscape professionals in Sonoma County learn their trade, hands-on, from sowing seeds and transplanting to pest management, a challenge that can mean literally removing aphids from leaves with alcohol-dipped cotton swabs. And almost all of the plants that the horticulture students baby for college credit are put up for sale as soon as they’re strong enough to be put in the ground.

Home gardeners can benefit from all that TLC. Once a month, the greenhouse and nursery are opened and people can come in and buy what the students have grown, which amounts to a selection of some 150 to 175 different types and varieties of plants.

“All of our plant material, we either propagate ourselves or we order plugs. We don’t sell anything unless it’s ready to be transplanted. We want to send people home with a product that will be successful,” said Alison Hastings-Pimentel, a recent graduate of the program who co-manages the SRJC greenhouse and nursery.

The next sale is April 13, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and will feature plants that earn their keep. That means plants that can either produce food, are drought-tolerant, native or attractive to pollinators. That goes for house plants, too. Except for a few holdover ferns that the school is closing out, the only houseplants are those that oxygenate, such as ficus, spider plants, Boston ferns and snake plants. There will also be a special sale on the school’s annual Day Under the Oaks celebration May 1 as well as another monthly sale on May 11.

“The plant world is so fascinating,” said Michele Hilton, a current student and other half of the plant production management team.

Proceeds from the sale support the program and scholarships for students, who can work toward certificates in several specialties, including nursery management, landscape maintenance and computer-assisted garden design.

“We have a lot of support from professionals in the field who donate everything from money to products to their knowledge,” said Hastings-Pimentel.

Like many of the students in the small vocational program, she came to it as an encore career. She worked for years in retail management and for 15 years had a floral business in Mill Valley. And now that her youngest is about to graduate from high school, she said she felt it was “time to pay attention to what I want and what will make me happy.”

“I’ve been a gardener my whole life. My mother was a gardener. My sister was a gardener. I want to study what I want to do. And now here I am,” she said, cheerfully. She now has a fledgling garden design company in addition to her work at SRJC.

The paycheck is not large but the personal dividends are when you love what you’re doing.

“It’s not a life where you make a lot of money,” said Hilton, who, like her colleague, went back to school after her kids got older. “My mother retired a few years ago and said, do something you wake up in the morning and enjoy doing. Life’s too short. Money comes and goes. I come here and it makes me happy. I have amazing people I work with. I’m surrounded by plants in the sun. I get my hands dirty.”

Other students have the same perspective. Noreen Fenton of Santa Rosa said she signed up after being forced into retirement. She happened to be sitting on her couch one day, thinking her opportunity to join the greenhouse production class had passed, but then realized it hadn’t and that it started in an hour.

“I got out of my sweats and ran for it,” said Fenton.

Students are each assigned five varieties of plants and are responsible for raising up at least two flats of each type. Ultimately, they get snatched up for the plant sale. At the end of the semester they write up a crop report on each type.

The class has taken a major turn toward producing plants that are drought-tolerant and/or native to California. And, responding to trends, this year they have added edibles to their inventory, which amounts to about 7,500 plants at any given time.

That was the inspiration of Jana Peters, one of several interns who work the greenhouse. She started growing vegetable and herb starts as her internship project and it “snowballed,” as she says.

Shoppers at their sale in April can choose among seven varieties of tomatoes, two different basils, several varieties of sweet and hot peppers, as well as various cucumbers and squashes, both summer and winter.

Popular tomato varieties, like San Marzano, which is good for sauces, Brandywine, Sungolds and Sweet 100s, will be available in four-inch and one-gallon pots.

Also trending hot in the plant world are succulents, which SRJC students are also growing for sale, from pretty flowering Kalanchoes to striking aeoniums with their fleshy rosettes,

Ornamental plants that attract beneficial pollinators are also thriving in the greenhouse, such as lavender, rosemary, agastache or butterfly mint and five types of abutilon, which also attracts hummingbirds.

Hastings-Pimentel said the nursery and greenhouse is not officially organic because of all the regulatory hoops required for certification. But they utilize similar practices, including integrated pest management, that involves non-toxic and natural ways to deal with pests.

Intern Alison Holmes is the program’s unofficial plant doctor and looks for non-toxic remedies. That might mean unleashing a beneficial bug like syrphid flies to go after aphids. She mixes up her own environmentally safe sprays, like vinegar mixed with chili pepper and garlic.

Plants are cultivated in the greenhouse and then hardened off outside in the courtyard. Larger plants are sent over to the nursery, a fenced-off area on the other side of the parking lot.

All plant sales are held at the greenhouse, which adjoins Lark Hall (home of the planetarium) off the Bech Parking lot off Elliott Avenue. For more information email ahastings-pimentel@santarosa.edu or call 527-4408.

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 521-5204. On Twitter @megmcconahey/