Photo by Jenny Kirk Matt Jones feeds a flat filled with small pots through the large flat-filler machine during a recent demonstration as Missy Jones waits to collect them on the other side after the pots are filled. The piece of equipment saves a great deal of time as various sizes of pots were previously filled by hand.

TRACY — Greenwood Nursery has always been a family business, and for the last 37 years, that business has kept up with the times by using improved technology as a way to meet the growing needs of its customers.

Jeff Farber, who started the Greenwood Nursery store in Tracy in 1981, said one of the newest additions is growing plants and more for the top online nursery company in the United States.

“We have about 30 items that we grow for this company,” Farber said. “We ship them around the United States, to about 35 states. We just started that last fall.”

While the majority of Greenwood customers in the area still shop in-store, there has been a growing number of customers nationwide who want access to products online. The upward trend aligns with the increasing popularity of online shopping for other types of products.

Customers typically save money by purchasing items on-site rather than online because of the additional shipping costs involved, but Farber said he’s willing to offer both services because a growing number of customers want that online option.

“Agreeing to grow locally and ship wherever needed takes a huge commitment,” he said. “We package three times a week, on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. We’ve got one employee that does this every day for those three days. And they provide the boxes and the shipping labels, so basically, all we’re doing is growing it for them.”

While they’re taking baby steps to start off, Farber said there’s opportunities to expand in the future.

“We’re starting out small,” Farber said. “They (the online company) came up and visited us three or four times over the previous two years, to make sure we can do it. They looked at the quality and our ability to hopefully deliver on the shipping. You only have three days to ship all the week’s orders that might come out.”

Greenwood Nursery expanded in September 1985 with a store in Marshall. Currently, roughly 25 people are employed full time and part time between March and December at the two stores. During the peak months of April, May and June, that number goes up to 40.

Greenwood Nursery continues to be a family business. The Tracy and Marshall stores are led by Farber’s daughter Missy Jones, son-in-law Matt Jones and son Jason Farber.

“Working with family is fun,” Missy Jones said. “We do often butt heads, but overall, we do work well together. My dad wants to work as long as he is able to. I’m not sure he’d know what to do in the morning if he didn’t show up at the nursery.”

Jones said being a wholesale grower for a large online nursery company has been a positive experience for Greenwood Nursery.

“With the way we overwinter our plants, it allows us to extend our selling season by shipping out dormant nursery stock while there is still snow on the ground in our area,” she said. “We also wholesale to several smaller landscapers and garden center in our region.”

This spring, a floral shop was added to the Tracy location.

“There was a big demand for it in the Tracy area and we had to turn away several customers who were asking for floral items,” Jones said. “We knew it needed to be added back in town, but we never had anyone who was willing to run it until our floral manager talked with us and she she was willing to commit if we added floral. And we have been very busy with that since it started in April.”

Greenwood Nursery prides itself on growing between 85-90 percent of everything it sells. About a 90,000 square foot area is for annuals, perennials and greenhouse production. The total area for operations is 14 acres, though 4 acres is currently rented to its Hmong neighbors for gardens.

“Right now, we have 9-½ greenhouses,” Missy Jones said.

A pot-in-pot system is used in the container tree area, where more than 2,300 trees and evergreens in different stages of growth are located.

“There are about 2,500 holes or better and that’s just for trees,” Jones said. “You put a pot in the ground and then a tree in the same size pot — you put that in the pot in the ground — so the tree doesn’t blow over.”

A lot of manual labor was required recently when flash flooding occurred in numerous parts of southwest Minnesota. Tracy was hit especially hard.

“The pots they’re just sitting in are flooded, so we had to take a lot of them out,” Jones said. “The pots are just so full of water, so it’s almost like you’re setting them in a lake. It’s been that way for three weeks, but when we got that big rain, we knew we had to get these trees dried out.”

While it’s a lot more expensive, a drip irrigation system for the trees and shrubs cuts down on the daily hand-watering duties.

“The irrigation in the greenhouses and nursery yard is also a huge labor saver,” Missy Jones said. “They are just programmed to run on a certain schedule. We haven’t had to use it lately (in the nursery yard) because it keeps raining all the time.”

Jones said the irrigation system also helps with the shortage of labor they’ve had in the past few years.

“Instead of having employees standing out there with a garden hose, they can be doing trimming or deadheading to the plants to keep them looking nice for customers,” she said. “(Hand-watering) is a pretty labor-intensive job and it has been hard to find people who can or are willing to do some of these jobs, so we had to find a way to make things easier for the employees we do have, but still offer nice quality plants for our customers.”

Jones said it was an all-around benefit that employees are able to spent their time planting and maintaining plants instead of the somewhat mindless jobs of filling pots with soil and watering.

A lot of people taking a tour recently enjoyed learning about the flat filler, a big machine that makes it easier to fill different sizes of pots with special soil.

“This is our own potting soil,” Matt Jones said. “It’s the Greenwood Nursery potting mix. It’s the same stuff that’s in our bags that we sell.”

Missy Jones said there is a company by St. Cloud that mixes the potting soil for Greenwood.

“Our nursery stock is all customized,” Matt Jones said. “That comes on a bulk semi, with like 40 yards on there. They’ll dump a big pile of that — I bet we usually use four or five semi-loads full a year. We go through a lot.”

Not too long ago, when employees didn’t have anything to plant, Jones said they spent a day just filling pots.

“That thing saves a lot of time,” he said. “We did eight pallets and we stacked them up pretty high, so they’re ready to go when we can plant again in a week or two.”

Farber’s dad, the late Al Farber, used to spent countless hours hand-filling pots, so that workers could plant flowers to sell.

“After he retired, he’d come help us at the nursery,” Missy Jones said of her grandpa. “He used to spend a lot of time filling them all by hand. The flat filler saves us a lot of time now in that we no longer have to have each tray or pot filled by the employees.”

Jones said it just takes one person to feed the flats and pots into the machine and one person to collect them after they come out.

“We can fill the pots when we are slower in the fall and winter and then stockpile them for spring when it is crazy and there are 100 other things that employees can be doing,” she said. “They are just ready to go.”

Along with the potting soil, Greenwood Nursery has a greenhouse mix and geranium mix. They said they seed about 80 percent of the vegetable plants they grow as well.

“We are constantly growing a new crop for the future seasons,” Jones said.