As we reopen the greenhouse for the spring , and, welcome the craziness that spring brings for us, we are stopping to reflect on our past 20 years in business. We are so thankful for each and every one of our customers, for supporting us in our first years, and still supporting us now after we have moved to our new location. So, we’d like to take a minute to share our story, and express our gratitude for each new beginning.
In early 2000, Pete started a landscaping business. He had a group of loyal customers that he would landscape for. He updated their landscaping in the spring, trimmed the landscaping in the fall, and mowed their lawns all summer. The business ran for years, and then we finally decided that opening a retail garden center would allow us to carry products that would help us run the landscaping business, while also selling products to the community.
In spring of 2005, we opened our first greenhouse on Butternut Rd. We only sold a small variety of annuals, and a few select shrubs. We had one small greenhouse in the yard of our house, and we had our shrubs arranged around our greenhouse. I was so excited to start this new venture, but I was also extremely nervous, because I had no idea how this was going to go. It could have been a total failure, or it could flourish. And that’s exactly what it did. We had made our best effort at advertising, and we had a group of loyal customers who would drive out of the city to support us. Since we had such a small variety of plants, we were only open in the spring and very early summer. But this small retail season wasn’t quite enough for us. We realized soon enough that we had to relocate in an area with more exposure so that we could increase our customer base. Two of our children were born while we ran our business from this location. Because of this, our kids grew up around the plants, and they are very involved in our business today.
In 2008, we decided to move to a larger area on North Madison Street. We built a greenhouse bigger than our previous one, and set up a shrub yard with a much larger variety than we had on Butternut Road. We also started carrying bulk mulches, landscaping stone, topsoil, fertilizer, and landscape paper, among other things. Our goal was to create a place that carried everything you needed for your landscaping projects. And we like to think that we have fulfilled our intentions to this day. This new location gave us much more exposure than our last, and because of that, we met a lot of new people. People who still shop with us, and support us to this day. Our other two children were born while we occupied this location. We have more pictures of them with the flowers than we can count! As we continued to carry more product, and increase our retail season, we realized that we were starting to outgrow our space. So, after ten years at a place that was like a second home to us, we started making plans to move. We wanted our new location to have everything that we could have possibly dreamed of, and we wanted this to be the permanent home of our business.
After years of planning every little detail and building our new location, we opened our new location in May of 2018. We had a lot of late nights leading up to our grand opening on May 12th. We wanted everything to be set up flawlessly, because we wanted this day to be perfect. The day of our grand opening was like the day that all of our dreams had come true. We opened our café inside the greenhouse, named Butternut Farms after our very first greenhouse. All of our devoted customers, and many people that we had never met before, came to support us, and we could not be more thankful for how amazing our first year was. This year will be our third year at our new location, and we cannot wait to make it our best year yet!
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It's a beautiful place and A1 customer friendly service.
Great pictures! Great story! Wishing you many more years of continued success! It's not easy! I'm looking forward to visiting again!