Valentine's Day

News Flash!!!  

Snow has been falling as the temperatures plunge here in the Near North Valley.  We could have quite a few inches by morning.  

As a post-doc in the NMSU Department of Horticulture, the professors were looking to offload some of their non-academic obligations on me.  One of those was faculty oversight of the Hort Forum, the club for Horticulture majors.  It was not an onerous job for a bachelor, spend an evening or a morning working with the almost exclusively female students.  

The club's activities centered on the horticultural calendar:  Poinsettias at Christmas, lilies at Easter, bouquets for Mother's Day, chile ristras in the fall.  Perhaps the biggest event in the year was the sale of roses for Valentine's Day.

The order would've been placed with florists months ahead.  The thousands of stems would arrive the week before V-Day.  Then the club would hold an all-evening session to prepare the roses.  Each bloom was carefully de-thorned by hand.  Then a thin florist's wire was hooked into the base of the flower and spiraled down the stem.  This would keep the rose from nodding as it aged.  

Finally, the flowers were placed in florist buckets and stashed in the roo-sized vegetable coolers.  Care was taken to make sure no fruits were in there with them.  The ethylene from a few old apples would've catastrophically "ripened" our precious roses overnight.

Then it was only a matter of advertisement and holding the rose sale a day or two before Valentine's.  The club would always sell out and the profit margin was significant.  More importantly, the students learned the process, the timing, and the mechanism for hosting a florally themed event.  

Later in spring, the club would gather on a Saturday morning and guided by a knowledgeable faculty member (that would not be me), we'd prune the ornamental roses in the beds in front of the Ag Building.  With that, we would've completed the commercial lifecycle of the rose business.