… the Rest of the Story

Jennifer Polanz

In Ellen Wells’ buZZ! newsletter in June, I wrote about the College Cucumbers program at Collier’s Greenhouse & Garden Center in Jackson, Georgia. If you missed it, the garden center offers a promotion called College Cucumbers that raises funds to offer a scholarship annually for a Jackson High School senior going into agriculture or horticulture. This year, they raised over $1,000 for the scholarship award. And the name of the cucumber? Sweet Success!

BUT, there’s more to the story, I found. When I followed up with a question to Samuel Di Rito at the greenhouse (you may remember him as one of last year’s Young Retailer finalists), he gave me a little more background. It turns out, his grandma, Dottie Collier, used the cucumbers as a way to teach Sam and his brother the plant-growing process from seed to retail.

“The proceeds used to go to our college fund; now after college we continue the tradition at Collier’s and use that money to fund a scholarship for a local high school graduating senior,” Sam said.

Sweet success, indeed. And in the immortal words of Paul Harvey, now you know … the rest of the story. GP