Business is Blooming

Amid the COVID-19 economic fallout area garden stores are seeing green

By Kalen McCain
Posted 6/3/20

At first, trends seemed as troubling for garden stores as other retail businesses. With farmers markets closing, state orders for late openings, and shoppers being more cautious overall, outlooks …

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Business is Blooming

Amid the COVID-19 economic fallout area garden stores are seeing green

Posted

At first, trends seemed as troubling for garden stores as other retail businesses. With farmers markets closing, state orders for late openings, and shoppers being more cautious overall, outlooks were grim.

Reha Greenhouse in Wellman opened to the public in late April — nearly a month later than usual — due to concerns about the virus. The late start gave them time to re-arrange their layout to better facilitate social distancing and acquire sanitary and protective equipment. The wait also yielded warmer weather so they could increase ventilation in the greenhouse, but the delay came at the cost of early-season shoppers.

To minimize losses, the store rolled out options for shoppers to arrange curbside pickups from website and phone orders, both of which remained available after opening doors. They have encouraged in-store shoppers to wear face masks, maintain social distancing whenever possible and set a limit of 20 shoppers at a time for their spacious greenhouse.

“We felt like those things kind of helped people feel good about coming into an environment where there might be more people,” said Marianne Reha-Van Roekel, who co-owns the business with her husband, Marty.

Their efforts paid off.

“People are doing more vegetable gardening and more flower gardening this year,” Reha-Van Roekel said. “You have your traditional gardeners and then we have a lot of newbie gardeners out there who are trying it out for the first time.”

She said the biggest spike in sales was for tomatoes, a go-to plant for beginner gardeners due to its relative easiness to care for and ability to produce food. The influx of novice gardeners has been a boon to the store with managers saying sales this year were up 15%.

In Kalona, Maple Street Nursery saw a similar business spike. Paul Beachy, owner of Maple Avenue Greenhouse, said his sales have been up across the board.

“People want to work in their yard if they can’t do anything else,” Beachy said. “That’s one of the nice things about staying home.  They can at least work with their families or spruce up the yard or even plant a garden, maybe raise some tomatoes for themselves if they’ve got some room, I think that’s a plus.”

At a time when families are cooped up in the interest of public health, gardening is one item on an ever-shrinking list of safe summertime activities.

“I think it may even help to kind of jump start some people to garden that weren’t doing that before,” Beachy said. “That’s one of the plusses that maybe comes out of this.”