Sunlight filtered through the plastic roofing of Sha’s Nursery as Shaley Barnes’ finished potting a tiny, spiky plant into a decorative glass with the deftness of finger that comes from long hours of practice.
The 16-year-old Wellston student created and runs her own nursery business - Sha’s Nursery - for her Supervised Agriculture Experience (SAE) for FFA. The project won first place in the state 2020 FFA Proficiency Awards nursery operations category.
“Shaley’s a great kid, great young lady and very good role model, highly respected among our peers and our teachers here on campus,” Wellston High School/Middle School Principal and Barnes’ former agriculture teacher Marty Coulson said. “[...] The school and the community and I’m sure FFA advisors and teachers, faculty and staff are all very proud of what she’s doing.”
Barnes’ nursery entrepreneurship project is unlike most FFA projects. “For Shaley it was very unique, very different, unlike anything I’ve ever heard of before for a student,” Wellston high school ag teacher Amber Cox said. “Not many [students] have their own greenhouse.”
In order to receive her State FFA degree Barnes needed to complete a SAE.
“Of course, my first thought was, let’s get a nursery,” Barnes said. “It’s something that I would love to have and I could learn a lot from it, so it could help me in a future career.”
The nursery is located in a greenhouse that Barnes’ father helped build for her as a birthday present, according to Cox, and its contents are a labor of love.
“It’s the experience of doing what I love and being around plants and doing something that not everyone else does,” Barnes said.
Gifts from friends and family helped her with the nursery. She has received leftover classroom plants from Coulson and pieces for building or repairing the greenhouse from her aunt and grandmother.
At 480 square feet, the nursery houses between approximately 200-300 plants each season. Plants line the work tables and hang in pots from the framing which supports the plastic roofing. Inside the nursery, Barnes uses collected rainwater as she plants, grows, repots, and tends to a variety of plants, including succulents, produce, decorative coleus and multiple varieties of aloe vera.
While some of her plants are raised in house from seed, others are obtained from other growers, Barnes said. She then sells the plants at farmers’ markets and local events.
“Everything she has done, all of her numbers, everything is true and right and how it’s supposed to be,” Cox said. “It is an authentic student-led business, unlike anything I’ve really ever seen in what was a 15-year-old girl.”
Sha’s Nursery sells approximately 40 plants per event, Barnes said, and the process of building the nursery has taught her about running a business.
“The most rewarding part was definitely learning how to use leadership skills and be able to handle money,” she said. One of her top selling items?
Succulents - plants, typically spikey, that store water in their thick leaves to help them endure dry climates. Their hardy nature makes them one of the simpler plant varieties to care for.
“That’s what I started out with,” Barnes said. “So, I started with getting plastic dinosaurs and I spray paint them. And then, of course, cut a hole in the top and then I put a succulent in the top of it.” Another aspect of her business is answering client questions about how to care for the plants.
“Somebody comes up to me and they say, this is the issue that I have with my plant at home, […] and they don’t have any pictures or any other information other than it’s just sick,” Barnes said. “It’s kind of hard to dissect and pick apart that word ‘very sick.’ And you have to learn how to ask the right questions to understand what’s really wrong [...] and actually how to help them.”
One of the most common mistakes she sees is overwatering. Many plants such as succulents don’t necessarily need to be watered daily and can be harmed if they are given too much water.
“[Someone] actually bought a cactus from me, and she watered it once every couple of days.” Barnes said. “And behind her, her sister was watering it every day. And she called me, she said, ‘Shaley, how do I fix this? What’s wrong with it?’ I was like, ‘well, there’s mold on it so you’re probably over watering it’.”
Communicating the plants’ care needs to their new owners is important.
“You have to be very knowledgeable, as well – knowing what you’re talking about, so you don’t give them false information,” she said.
It was taking an agriculture class in seventh grade that helped her begin building her knowledge and sparked her interest in FFA.
“I was in seventh grade when I started with land judging,” she said. “So that’d be three years ago, roughly. I just started out in the classroom of course with Mr. Coulson and then once I hit eighth grade was when nursery and landscape was introduced to me.”
The introduction to the FFA nursery and landscape category came from a friend.
“One of my older friends, she was a junior at the time, she kind of just walked up to me and said ‘Shaley you’re going to do this,’ and I was like ‘okay, let’s do it’,” Barnes said.
The nursery and landscape team that she was on at Wellston qualified to go to national competition in 2018, Coulson said.
“The team did exceptionally well at Nationals -- all the members. She was actually a silver emblem participant in the national nursery and landscape contest, so she was really, really involved in it,” Coulson said.
Then she started Sha’s Nursery in early 2019.
Building and maintaining the nursery project is an ongoing process.
“By the end of this year we’re hopefully going to get concrete in the bottom [of the greenhouse],” Barnes said.
She is also working on expanding the types of plants she offers.
“This year, we just started in on adding in other areas to my greenhouse. So instead of just the traditional using soil as a medium for plants to grow in, we’ve started in with an aquaponic system, which is using fish to supply the nutrients [to] your plants while your plants are in water,” she said.
The produce side of her business is growing as well.
“We’re expanding to not just growing the plant but also [producing] the thing coming from the plants,” she said. “We’ve started adding in jams and jellies that we personally made.”
Barnes hopes to become an FFA state officer, she said, and plans to continue studying agriculture in college.
Her plants will be available for sale at the Old Chicken Farm Vintage Barn Sale, June 19-20.
More information can be found on the Sha’s Nursery Facebook page.