Seeing green: Hamilton garden centres prepare to repeat a record year

The road from April showers to May flowers started with phone calls in December.

Typically, Paterno Nurseries in Dundas places its orders for vegetables, annuals and other garden goods in late winter into early spring. But last year's blockbuster sales at local garden centres compelled business-owners to rethink their strategy, thanks to high demand from pandemic green thumbs.

This year, we were booking before Christmas just to see where our suppliers were at, making sure that they were going to have enough for everybody," said co-owner Mike Paterno. To be honest, some of them said that they couldn't supply us this year because they had already set aside a certain amount for their bigger customers."

In over five decades of business, the past year was one of the best for sales for the family-run business, which had to hire more staff to keep up with demand. They expect it to continue this spring. The nursery grows a lot of its own plans, trees and shrubs, and relies on suppliers for the rest.

We had no idea what to bring in, how much of it," at the start of the pandemic, he said. And it turned out that we couldn't get enough of it." This includes supporting the explosive popularity of vegetable plants, and tripling stock for seeds.

William Dam Seeds, in Dundas, has a six-week wait to ship orders - only certain items qualify for curbside pickup - and a two-week response time to customer service inquiries, with phone lines overwhelmed," according to its website. Many of its seed varieties are out of stock.

At Harper's Garden Centre, tomato, cucumber, zucchini and eggplant are usually the top four vegetables to sell out, and co-owner Michael Simone is advising avid gardeners to get an early start to secure the plants (and to be mindful of overwatering - a wet season is in the forecast).

Harper's launched its first e-commerce site last March to create a curbside pickup option and expand shipping capacity across Canada for certain houseplants sourced from tropical regions.

Simone said the surge in demand has helped his business remain open, keep people employed, and in turn, be able to support other local businesses to keep the local economy going."

Some businesses affected by Friday's latest COVID-19 restrictions may have to amend operations again to comply with the Ontario-wide shutdown orders, which come into effect just one week after Hamilton went into lockdown. Terra Hamilton has kept capacity at 20 per cent since day one," said store manager John Hawley.

It really didn't affect us that much, switching over to the quote-unquote lockdown' because it's not a true lockdown," Hawley said. For the safety of our customers and for our staff, we just felt like that was the responsible thing to do to manage our space."

Despite the capacity limit, Hawley said the centre has been extremely successful" during the pandemic, with an influx of first-time gardeners, a boost in nursery and perennial products to landscape, and an increasing trend in people wanting to grow their own vegetables and herbs.

Cathy Commisso, a co-owner at Satellite Gardens, said staff have been tending to more involved questions from first-time gardeners about choosing a fertilizer, how to grow organically, and starting seeds, for example. This, coupled with higher customer volumes, enforcing distancing measures and a more challenging supply chain, will make for a busy season ahead.

We're preparing ourselves to have another COVID year.'"

Vjosa Isai is a reporter at The Spectator covering Hamilton-based business. Reach her via email: visai@thespec.com.