Another year, another new native plant sale experience.  With the pandemic showing no signs of slowing down in fall 2020, we made the decision to hold an online plant sale with drive-through pick-up—something we had never done before.  It was a bit of a learning curve to get the online sale set up, but we went live in early January and watched with delight as the number of sales increased with each day! The next challenges were planning how to assemble all the orders while following social distancing and other safety protocols, and organizing the pick-up in a way that would not result in a huge traffic jam.

We consulted with other organizations who had done online sales and came up with a plan. All our planning resulted in an organized process for filling orders, and pick-up went very smoothly! We could not be happier with how everything turned out this year, and if you participated in our sale, we hope you were also happy with the result.

We want to thank Bauman’s once again for being flexible and allowing us to use their greenhouse for an extended period this year to allow for the extra time it took us to put together all the plant orders.

We also want to thank the small number of volunteers who helped us put together orders and helped with the pick-up process. We had originally planned to do all of this using only Marion SWCD staff (to reduce the amount of contact and maintain social distancing), but we quickly realized that it was too much work to assemble the plant orders with our small staff, so thank you to the volunteers who helped us on short notice! Every year I say this, but we could not do this plant sale without our wonderful volunteers! You are amazing and very appreciated!

We can’t forget a great big thank you to our customers, both old and new, who supported our plant sale this year.  For longtime customers , we appreciate your continued support as we navigate new situations and new ways of holding the plant sale. Some of our new customers experienced losses due to the wildfires in 2020. We appreciate your support and are grateful that we were able to provide native plant material to help your property recover.

We had a small number of plants left over from the sale, and we happily donated those to families affected by the wildfires.

Overall, we are glad that we were able to adapt and still hold our native plant sale this year despite the challenging situation. We take pride in providing native plant material to our community, no matter what it takes! 

We want to hear from you!   We would appreciate your taking a few minutes to complete this brief survey (only 5 questions!) to help us with future planning for our native plant sale.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/D5S2GDZ