BRADENTON, Fla. — This year, a popular holiday decoration may be hard to come by in our area.
This is because recent storms have wiped out a large portion of poinsettias, grown here in the Tampa Bay area, which could mean that the plants will be in short supply in some Florida stores this year.
One Manatee County nursery that produces the flowers is dealing with the aftermath of the two major storms which also destroyed farm buildings and structures. The damage will also affect Orban's Nursery's annual traditional poinsettia open house, a popular local event that attracts families seeking early holiday cheer.
This time of the year a sea of red petals of thousands of poinsettia plants would greet visitors driving into Orban's Nursery. While community members could walk in and purchase the plants, several pellets and cases would be prepared for shipment out to local stores and sold to those customers on time for the holiday season. However, the opposite is the case currently when you drive down the dirt road into the nursery's complex.
All the beautiful poinsettia plants that they had spent effort and long hours to plant since the growing season began in July are now all gone.
"Yeah, we just put a lot of work into what we do so to just have a 100% loss. It's just devastating," Tyler Orban of Orban's Nursery said.
One month later, it's still hard for Tyler Orban to talk about the destruction of their family farm from hurricanes Helene and Milton.
"It pretty much ruined all the shade on all the shade houses, some of the posts, a lot of the cables so we're putting all that stuff back together," Orban said. "The greenhouses as you can see on this side of me, they are like structures themselves and hold up pretty well, but we got a couple that got destroyed like this one behind you that the office landed on top of and beat it up pretty good."
Along with the farm's structures, including their large barn and a trailer used as an office, the storms destroyed around 200,000 poinsettias, at least 100,000 annual plants as well as other landscape plants.
Such a massive loss at the farm alone, coupled with similar losses at area nurseries has now eaten into the area's supply for the holiday season.
"We had 100% loss on poinsettias, 100% loss on our annuals, and like 80 to 90% loss on our landscape plans that we have, and even some of those are still kind of dwindling off unfortunately," he said. "We are not the only Nursery in the area that got flooded out with saltwater either. There are at least two other ones close by that do a pretty good number of poinsettias. That got beat up pretty bad so yes, there's definitely going to be a shortage of poinsettias in the area this year."
Getting supplies too to help with the rebuilding and the repairing of farm structures has been challenging so far has made the recovery process even slower.
"The poly that we use for the roofs and screens and stuff, you can get pretty quick, but there's a ton of damage from both of those storms and Debbie and all the way up in the Carolinas, they're dealing with it too, so there's a ton of nurseries in a similar situation," he added.
While some of the impacted local farmers await the cushioning that insurance provides, they are hoping for more targeted state and federal assistance for the farming community to help them recover fully.
In the meantime, they're asking to community to help folks like them stay in business and still shop local despite the absence of their signature plants this holiday.
"It's definitely different going through the holiday seasons without any poinsettias. It'll hurt but we will be back next year. We are going to try our best to be back next year and hopefully be back to a new normal hopefully, so we've got a lot of work to do," Orban said.
The Orban's Nursery garden center is back open and offering other landscaping plants and services. They have started a fundraising initiative on GoFundMe to help garner donations towards their rebuilding process.