Our Story
Grow Bloom Thrive
We began Creekside Nursery in 2005 when we started growing a small amount of produce and selling it at the Gastonia Farmers Market. I will never forget how excited we were when we made $100 on our first Saturday! Over the next five years our business grew rapidly due to the demand for high quality, fresh produce and cut flowers. Not only did Creekside grow but our family grew also by two more precious babies during those years, bringing us to a total of three children under the age of five.
Spring of 2010 proved to be our largest and most challenging season as we had a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) of over 20 families and a brand new baby born in late April. By late that summer we knew we were going to have to shift our business model from predominantly produce to focusing on flowers and plants. Over the next two years we transitioned into selling all types of hanging baskets, annual and perennial bedding plants at the Charlotte Farmers Market. Again we found that there was a great demand for high quality plants and the helpful plant knowledge we were able to offer our customers. We continued to grow and thrive as a business.
During the summer of 2013 we broke ground on what you now see as Creekside Nursery. We are blessed with 8.5 acres of gorgeous, peaceful land that we always knew we wanted to share with others. What a better way to be a steward of the land than to fill it with beautiful plants and flowers? We erected greenhouse #1during the late winter of 2013, and we immediately began using it for plant production. Before we knew it that growing season was over and we were on to our biggest project yet...building the barn!
August of 2015 was when we began building the barn. To say this was a labor of love is an understatement! It would end up taking us close to two years to fully finish the barn as we would often have to stop and work on a smaller project. (Do you get the sense that there is ALWAYS a project going on here at the nursery?) What is so neat about the barn is that all of the interior & exterior siding is from timber here on the property! Jerry cut all of the trees for the barn, and then we used Jenny's dad's sawmill to rough cut the lumber. All of the wood is from Virginia pines except for four of the interior walls which came from a Tulip Poplar that was damaged in a storm. The largest of those boards measured 17" wide!
While building the barn in October of 2015 we took some time to step away in order to build greenhouse #2. This extra growing space greatly increased the number of plants we were able to grow in a season! When Spring of 2016 came around we were ready to roll with two greenhouses and a finished barn, but the biggest change to the nursery was that we began growing the Proven Winners brand of plants. PW's plants were far superior than any other brand of plants we had grown both as a professional and as a home gardener. As we began to share the PW love with our customers they too had a renewed excitement about their gardening! Each year since, we have added more and more Proven Winners to our inventory, and in 2016 we became a PW Certified Garden Center.
At every available opportunity we work on a project here at the nursery. We have big dreams that we want to bring into reality and we're not afraid of hard work accompanied by sweat (and a few tears at times). It is our dream and desire to create an environment and culture here at Creekside that makes people feel welcomed and loved while taking in all the beauty that the nursery has to offer.