Students, teacher, prepare flower baskets for Mother’s Day

The annual Lake Pend Oreille High School Mothers Day Flower sale will begin Monday, May 6 to help raise funds for student programs, art supplies and other projects.

Randy Wilhelm, the art, CTE and graphic design teacher, has been running the flower basket sale for the past 19 years, he said.

The program will be selling geraniums, marigolds, nasturtiums, pansies and zinnias, he said. There will also be tomatoes, peppers and zucchini.

“We don’t have a greenhouse class, so I just cycle all my classes through,” Wilhelm said. “They’ll be grumbling, but by the time they’re ready to sell [the students will] be like, ‘I helped grow that.’”

In addition to funding projects for his classes, art supplies, Wilhelm also purchased beehives for students last year, he said.

After starting four years ago himself, he purchased several hives for the school last year. The students were fascinated, he said, and several graduates came back during the summer to help.

“To watch the bees work is just very calming,” he said.

While he ost recently used funds raised for the honeybee project he started for the students, Wilhelm also uses the funds to help individual students who need it.

“I’ve bought stuff for kids, I’ve paid for driver’s ed, I’ve helped a kid go to a college fair,” he said.

Wilhelm is also saving money to pour a concrete floor in the greenhouse, which will help make cleanup easier — especially as the greenhouse is now being used for portions of the bee projects as well as the flowers and vegetables.

The flower baskets will sell for $25 each, and roughly 200 will be available, he said.

For the past ten years or so, Wilhelm’s had regular customers who buy roughly 20 baskets, he said. The baskets go on sale the Monday before Mother’s Day and sell within a week.

“They usually sell pretty fast,” he said. “Most of them are gone by Friday.”

Wilhelm and his classes are also selling “Supertunias,” a special variety of petunia.

“It sounds like a marketing scam,” Wilhelm said, “[but] normal petunias, you have to deadhead them to keep them blooming. They’re self-pruning and super hardy.”

Wilhelm’s Supertunias were blooming until October of last year, he said, and are very forgiving plants even with minimal care.

For more information, Wilhelm can be reached at randy.wilhelm@lposd.org.