Find a variety of flowering vines at the sale. Here it is one month into spring and your good intentions to start seeds early for summer veggies and flowers never materialized. What to do and where to go?

Let the students in Susan Collins’ Lawn, Gardening, and Gifts Enterprise class resurrect your summer garden plans. Since last August, they have been actively studying plant science through propagation of seeds, bulbs, cuttings, and divisions. A professional Plexiglas domed greenhouse is their classroom laboratory.

By spring the greenhouse is buzzing with activity. In preparation for the sale, students transferred seedlings to sales pots and cell packs. They are grooming the blooming bonanza for your yard.

The selection, quality, and pricing beats big box garden centers hands down. Students used Fafard, the green standard in soilless potting mix and Osmocote fertilizer.

With backyard food gardens on the rise, vegetables and herbs are the most likely to sell out first. The early bird gets the pick–of– the–greenhouse tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, yellow squash, zucchini, basil, thyme, rosemary and mint.

Butterfly gardeners will find blue salvia, pentas, coneflower, black–eyed susan, and daisies. There are hollyhocks, columbine, and bleeding heart vines for nostalgia lovers. Kniphofia, the red hot poker plant attracts hummingbirds with its flaming flowers. Long on beauty and history, papyrus has been grown for millennia. Add some to your fish pond or bog garden.

If you like plants with unusual characteristics, sample walking iris and night blooming cereus. The spent bloom of walking iris sends an air root down to the soil to duplicate itself. The one night flowers of the night blooming cereus are worth losing sleep over to see.

Spider plants lined up and ready to march home with you. Have you promised yourself a dogwood tree or a blooming hibiscus as large as a tree? Come and get it.

The indoor plant enthusiast will find begonias, aralia schelfflera, pothos, Swedish ivy, sansevieria, philodendron, spider plants, ficus, aloe vera, tradescandia, and more.

Additionally, plant offspring from City of Columbia beautification projects like Columbia marigolds and large black–leaf ele- phant ears will be for sale.

Plants are priced in the $1.50 to $5 to $10 range. Profits from the sale go directly back to the instructional program. Collins purchases seed, soil, fertilizer, and containers. One portion of the funds covers a class trip to the tea plantation in Charleston.

The annual weeklong spring plant sale in the greenhouse runs from Monday, April 26 to Friday, April 30 from 9 am–5 pm at Heyward Career and Technology Center, 3560 Lynhaven Drive in Columbia.

The pencil cactus is easy and fun to propagate. The public may preview and purchase plants at Heyward’s Greenhouse during Richland One’s Career Showcase on Saturday, April 24 from 10 am–2 pm.

How often do you get to meet the propagator of your garden plants? You will walk away from the greenhouse with new plant and people friends.

If you have recyclables — seed, plants, or containers — to contribute to Collins’ program, bring them along when you come to the sale.