Annual Plant Sale
The DNPS hosts an annual native plant sale on the first Saturday of every November. This sale is our only fund raising event and all the proceeds go back into nursery operations, or put towards achieving the goals of our mission statement vision. The plants that are sold at each sale come from a variety of local sources:
Seed: The primary source is seed that has been collected by DNPS volunteers on the Delmarva Peninsula. We also purchase a small amount of seed from the Brandywine Conservancy, who also uses volunteers to collect locally. Each year these seeds are germinated in our greenhouse, and the plants are cared for all season by volunteers. If you would like to volunteer to collect seed for us, please see our volunteer section on this site.
Rescued plants: Each year the DNPS makes an effort to go to sites that are slated for development and “rescues” plants from those sites. We are informed of these sites by our network of members, friends, and professional colleagues. We then contact the land owners, hopefully obtain permission to enter the property prior to the commencement of construction activities, then schedule as many volunteer work days as we can and go in to dig plants out. These plants are then brought back to the nursery (as well as taken home by the volunteers) and cared for during the rest of the season. We will be posting volunteers dates for plant rescues periodically throughout the year.
Purchased plants: Typically, by sale time our inventory is a little low compared to what is offered at other native plant sales around the region, and we always like to have as much variety as possible for our customers. But to do this, we have to purchase hard to find, or hard to grow plants. We normally purchase plants from Natural Landscapes Nursery in Jennersville, PA. Though outside of the Delmarva Peninsula, the owners of Natural Landscapes do a lot of seed collecting on Delmarva and we try to restrict our purchases to those plants. Occasionally, we do purchase plants that have come from places far out of our region such as North Carolina, eastern PA, or New Jersey, but we still limit our purchases of these plants to the species that are native to Delaware and highly desirable.
