The smell of warm earth and green leaves filled the production room at Hooper’s Garden Center on Highway 35, where a replanting machine plucked thousands of fledgling petunias from their seedling pads and into the new plastic six-packs in which they will be sold to eager customers seeking color after a long winter.
Two-dozen workers dug their hands and arms into the soil, packaged petunias, and carted the packaged petunias to the greenhouses for more growth; by the height of summer, there will be 38 workers rushing about. Thirty-two-thousand flowers were transplanted in one day, and that pace will continue with plants of all kinds for the next three weeks as Hooper’s prepares for the spring rush.
Customers have already started stopping by to scrounge whatever signs of life they can find.
“Anything green, forget it — it’s gone out the door,” Cheri Hooper, owner and operator with her husband and in-laws for more than four decades, said as she selectively watered young geraniums and other budding newcomers in the main greenhouses.
Josh Groban’s voice poured out of the speakers in a place otherwise silent except for the late-winter wind whipping the walls, a last gasp in the sunlight. In about a month, when the real rush begins, this greenhouse will be full of flowers and greenery and the people hungering for them.
“We kind of think (the customers) are going to flood us,” production room manager Jean Huntsman said.
And it’s not just the customers who are thrilled about the changing seasons.
In his Montana suspenders and in his element, Robert “Dad” Hooper said he is ready for the rich and ripe tomatoes, his favorite plant, after a winter of grocery store produce. Cheri Hooper is thrilled to see her favorites, the colorful pansies, again.
“It’s a tough little bugger,” she said of the flower, which she believes gets an unfair reputation. “And it blooms its little heart out.”