Junior Kaela Stevens could put together her own wedding flowers.

As a part of the floral design skills team, she travels the state to different high school and college campuses, creating arrangements for wedding arches. The team competes through the Greenhand program as a part of the Future Farmers of America.

“Greenhand skills can include floral skills, welding, construction, animal science, lesson planning, and professional materials,” Stevens said., “sny and all agriculture and science areas.”

Along with Stevens, the team’s members include junior Isabella White and sophomore Cameron Smith. So far, the team has competed at Texas State and Texas A&M.

“So far we have performed pretty well,” Stevens said. “In the first two invitationals we attended, we got first and second place.”

Given a time limit, the team must work together to put together the arrangement. After the time is up, they must describe, in detail, how they made the arch and how to do the skill to the panel of judges.

“At one of the competitions, when I was saying our conclusion, I knew that we had done really well,” White said. “I was proud and happy for me and my team for giving it our all.”

For Stevens and White, floral design is fairly new. Growing up around both of her grandmas’  gardening, White fell in love with the idea of flowers. Only recently though has she been able to access this interest through the floral design program. This year is Stevens first year participating in floral design, but it has quickly formed into a passion.

“To be honest I just picked floral design as my elective because the counselor mentioned it as the easiest elective that is offered,” Stevens said. “This is my first year taking floral design and so far it hasn’t been too hard picking up a new skill. I have put in more work than I thought would be required and being on the team has meant missing a good bit of school, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

When they first got asked to join this skills team, none of the members knew each other, but they quickly developed into a family. As they’ve traveled across the state together, they become very close knit.

“The moral of the story is definitely to try new things.” Stevens said, “I was barely able to scrape together a team for the Greenhand skills team, but I made so many new friends, and have had some of the highlights of my year because of it.”