we recently hit a milestone here at gardening with creekside and it made us
pause and think about how far we've come as a nursery come with me sit on the
porch and let's show down memory lane together
stay tuned
hello friends welcome to gardening with creekside i am jenny and today
we are going to take a little stroll down memory lane we're sitting here on
our front porch and i have the laptop in front of me
just to kind of help me stay on track and go through what
and how far we have come as a nursery jerry and i started creekside nursery in
2005 and we began it as a little
side job doing some vegetable gardening and we quick
quickly realized how much we absolutely loved it
and it just grew and developed we'll fast forward and basically say we had
three babies in five years and the nursery was busy and booming as
a vegetable nursery i guess was vegetables were our
main focus and we began to shift to plants
and so creekside nursery as you know it right now
really began in 2000 and oh gosh 13.
that's right see all these days just like it seems like it was yesterday and
then on the other hand it seems like it was a lifetime ago but it was 2013.
when this picture was taken and you can see this beautiful
green lush field well that is actually where the whole nursery is right now
this was land that we had decided would be a
perfect spot to invite our customers to come and shop
and to grow our business so we recruited some friends
who have a local business clearing land and commercial
property and they prepped the land for us and you can see
i mean it was a massive undertaking they had to remove tons of trees they had to
regrade i mean the whole area just had to be
fixed this is one of my absolute favorite pictures though
jackson and megan standing there right there at the
culvert watching all of the equipment do
all of their work it was just such a sweet little picture and all
i think i'll always remember that but i wanted to show you this
picture um is from this angle where i'm standing if you have
been here at the nursery basically i am standing at the corner of
the pines and i am looking down onto the whole nursery
where you see that loader is basically the back of the
barn so that whole section contains now both
greenhouses the barn the outdoor shopping area and
all of that now of course my boys were in absolute
heaven when all this heavy equipment was out here working and you can see i
mean jackson and jerry were just in seventh heaven loved
every single minute of it and look how tiny jackson is
he's now 10 and he was just he was an itty bitty back then
but anyway we got the road the um excuse me got the land cleared
jerry did the road he installed the road this was in the fall you can see those
pretty fall colors that dirt path is now what is the road
but all throughout this whole process with creekside nursery our kids have
been a part of every single step of it
we basically say that they were raised in a greenhouse because we have pictures
of all of them at some stage in their life in a
greenhouse some of them like to eat dirt some of them some of them refused to
wear shoes and just had the absolute most fun
of course they all love the equipment they're all on the tractors they're all
you know in the kubota and driving things and just having the absolute
most fun jackson of course has always loved anything that has a motor and this
is one of those sweet pictures where he is
staring at jerry's chainsaw knowing that he is not supposed to touch it at all
and you can look at that face you can see
he wants to touch it so bad but he's holding his hands because he knows that
his mama will punish him quite severely if he touches
that chainsaw and then here we are
together in the whole construction process what was really this was
you know we do everything ourselves here because of god's grace and his
provisions he has allowed us to do all of this work and some
jobs are a little more fun than others and some are just
not very pleasant so this is one of those jobs that was not very pleasant
what we are doing is digging the holes for the fence and
the gate to the entrance of the nursery and oh my word i don't know if you have
ever used a two-person auger before but we were basically drilling through
concrete i mean look at this hole it is nothing but hard red north
carolina red clay with rocks in it we killed ourselves digging those holes
and so we were like we if we never see this equipment again
it'll be too soon but it got done look at that beautiful fence and that gate
was installed and it's still there today so clearly the hole has worked but man
now this is our first greenhouse going up
jerry has the black plastics where you see that black
landscape fabric that's where the greenhouse is he's going out there he's
going to put some gravel on it and there you see who is
supervising i mean every step of the way that little fella
is right there with his daddy making sure that um
everything is done and he just wants to sit there and watch and be a part of it
and then throughout this whole process of creekside nursery
we have had the most love and support from
friends and family this is one of our dear friends
mark he was actually at the time had been he was not at this time
had been our local ag agent and so he and his family are just precious to us
but he was in town one day and so we recruited him to help
drill the stakes that help that support the greenhouse that holds
it up and you can tell from mark's face it was
it was not a fun job but we just have the best
the best friends that help at any at any stage
so greenhouse is up it is going i mean that is the first structure that is the
first structure of creekside nursery of course you know like i said there's
the supervisor right there with his daddy the whole time
my parents have been fantastic this is where we're putting on the plastic
of the greenhouse this is our very first greenhouse ever putting up so we didn't
really know what in the world we were doing
um but we did it because jerry's brain god just designed jerry's brain to work
this way that he can figure these things out
so i never have any doubt what this man can do
but i was a little scared in this one because he was actually
walking along the top ridge pole of the greenhouse laying out plastic
not exactly the safest thing to do but all was well putting on plastic of a
greenhouse is quite interesting especially if you've never done it
before but alas it got done and there we go
so this was our first year this was our first spring
i believe this was spring of 2014 where we actually grew in the greenhouse
we sold from here people came but that is the first little
greenhouse so if you're looking at it now we have a greenhouse to the right of
that the pergola is to the left of it and then we began the barn so finish one
greenhouse start on the next project if you haven't
picked up on it here at creekside we always have a project going on like
there is just one thing after another so we built our barn ourselves so this
was that whole process of building the barn we actually
all the siding on the barn is pines from our property my daddy has
a sawmill and so we used his sawmill to cut
all of the lumber that is the siding of the barn so that's really fun
um and really neat and it was again just a whole family project i mean
everybody's there we um our german shepherd was there the kids
you know the whole the whole thing we got the building up
as far as the barn was up the frame was up we paused that and
then went back over and built another greenhouse
so now we have two greenhouses in that whole process
but jerry has always been one and i totally agree you work smarter
not harder so when we put this greenhouse up he did not use the
handheld manual post pounder i don't know what you call
it he used a pneumatic pounder so he used
hydraulics to pound them in the ground and it was
much much easier and that that's my daddy there supervising and helping
jerry so got that greenhouse up these are some
fun little pictures of um getting that wood sawed at the
sawmill with daddy um great pine that's
beautiful on the barn and that just took some time i mean it
again you know over time but we got it done the kids would always come over and
help and they would we would then have little campfires from all the
little scraps of wood so lots of fun now this is the spring of
2015 or 16. we'll put the right date up there they all kind of comes together we
actually had two green houses and a barn so there you go and then from
there it just kind of grew i mean the kids like i said have always
been involved it was 2016 when we first brought proven winners in to the nursery
and i tell people we decided to try it out because we'd heard great things
about it the brand itself so we brought in a
handful of plants they did amazingly well we loved them so
the next year we bought some more and every year we just
added more and more of the proven winners plants to our
inventory so then it was this year 2020
was our first year of being 100 proven winners annuals
so all of our annual inventory was 100 proven winners product and of course we
carry their perennials and shrubs and um but so if you're looking for some
proven winners then creekside nursery is definitely the
place to go but it's just there's so many memories the
kids have just been involved in every single step
of this nursery um they are an integral part
from the from the farmers market days and being babies in the playpen
um to now when you come and you'll meet the kids because they're here
they're working this is a family effort they are all in here together
but it was now so this is 2020 so it was december of last year 2019
that jerry got this great idea that we needed another large
production greenhouse so that is not the time
december and january february is not the optimal time to be putting up a
greenhouse that you plan on using for production
that year because we get plants in january and february so
trying to juggle all that was quite an ordeal
but again it all worked out it was great um we had to
jerry had to make a whole road coming from this property
all the way up to the production greenhouse of course the gravel trucks
come they're dumping they get stuck because it's wet in north carolina in
the winter but it's just always something around
here nothing really shocks us anymore because we have just about
seen it all but we have had the lord has just provided
amazing people in our creekside life uh our beloved christine came in a few
years ago and she is just an absolute integral
part of this whole operation we could not do this without her
so she is here we've had wonderful people we've had mary claire
working at the barn and we've had rylan and now we have
sara here so we truly are a family just working together and everybody pitches
in nobody says oh well i don't want to do that it's just like sure let's do it
let's tackle it so we do have that mentality here and it
is just it's a lot of fun it is a ton of work a ton of work but we
enjoy it and it's fun and it makes it all worth it when we get
to meet new customers and those customers become our friends
and then the hummingbirds sorry i get distracted i don't know if you
just saw that the hummingbirds are going quite crazy this morning but
friends who have become family and we never would have met those people had it
not been for creekside nursery so when we say
that when you come to the nursery where
you're really coming into our home you really are because the nursery i'm
sitting on my front porch and i can see the nursery right there it
is all connected and that is very intentional that we
share this property and this gorgeous land with with you and so we are just so
honored when you come and visit us so with all of you
wonderful people coming to visit us here at the nursery a lot of you just have
questions about you know the barn and the history so
that's why we really thought it would be wonderful and fun and just a lot of fun
for us to take this stroll down memory lane
and to share with creekside nursery with those of you that maybe
can't come to sorry i'm telling you the hummingbirds
are everywhere i know i'm like really distracted right now but they are
everywhere um so we wanted to share this nursery with
you for those of you that probably may not you're just too
far away so this is a way for us to welcome you
into our home and that was really the creation of youtube is to
bring people here who are just far away and it has worked
wonderfully we have people all over the place and
then our relationship with proven winners
it was back in march where we were making a video
of the vermillionaire and lemon coral sedum arrangement
that they took that video put it on their youtube channel
things just really from that point just exploded and has been
such a fun time we have a great working relationship with proven winners
we've helped run their booth at the southern spring show in charlotte for
the last two years this year christine got to join us we
met jack barnwell there it's just this nursery has opened up so many doors
of opportunities for us that we are
incredibly grateful for we have no clue where this nursery is
going to go or what the future holds for us but we do
know that it's going to be an amazing ride and we are so excited that you
are part of it with us so as always we love you we appreciate you
thank you for so much of your love and support
for those of you who are local who have supported us from day one
and i looked at some of these pictures and i'm like oh my goodness i can't
believe y'all actually came out to visit us
and though so those people who have been with us from the very very beginning to
those of you who have just joined us um welcome you are part of our family we
love you we appreciate you y'all have a great day cannot wait to
share our next video with you we'll see you next time
bye friends