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April showers, coronavirus bring more May flowers

Residents planting gardens, doing yardwork while practicing social distancing

By Bruce Hope bruce@opcfla.com
Posted 4/8/20

CLAY COUNTY – With unprecedented amounts of free time due to “stay-at-home” orders from Gov. Ron DeSantis, many people are finding themselves looking for ways to occupy their newfound spare …

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April showers, coronavirus bring more May flowers

Residents planting gardens, doing yardwork while practicing social distancing


Posted

CLAY COUNTY – With unprecedented amounts of free time due to “stay-at-home” orders from Gov. Ron DeSantis, many people are finding themselves looking for ways to occupy their newfound spare time. Family time and long-ignored home projects are now the order of the day, and one of the most prevalent is gardening and yardwork.

With the “stay-at-home” order in place, a lot of people still feel the need to get out and get fresh air. One of the ways people do that is to go outside and get their hands into the earth.

Multiple nurseries, hardware stores and Walmart have seen the rise in sales of gardening tools and equipment in addition to seeds, plants, flowers, bushes and small trees.

“Now they [people at home] have the time to make their houses and yards look pretty,” said Charlene, a garden department manager at a Fleming Island Walmart. She says that sales are up overall in plants and garden equipment. “I’ve sold $3,000 in patio sets in the last three days, so I like that part. People have all been really nice. They come in thanking us for being open.”

Aaron Stuckey, vice-president of Pat’s Nursery on US-17, has also seen the rise in sales. According to Stuckey, sales have gone up.

“We saw an influx for a little while,” said Stuckey. However, with increased restrictions, Pat’s has now changed their service to curbside pickup only. Customers may pull into a parking spot at the nursery but must remain inside their vehicles while staff members take their order and bring it to them, like a drive-through. “Sales are down now with curbside; we just started it today, but we’ll see. If people know what they want, it’s pretty simple to get it done. A lot of people don’t want to buy something they can’t see.” If they can’t get out and walk around to look at the plants and decide what they want, it can hurt the sales according to Stuckey.

For Jane Leet and Another Bloomin’ Nursery in Green Cove Springs, the new business has been great.

“We’ve had a lot more business lately with everybody not being able to go anywhere else and doing home projects that maybe they weren’t able to do before all of this happened,” said Leet. “We probably had a record week last week. Normally we would do a normal amount of business, but with all of this happening, it’s probably doubled since then.”

The spike in business has even facilitated the nursery extending their hours. Usually, they are open from 8 a.m.-4 p.m. They are now open an hour later.

“You have a lot of people working from home now and with kids being homeschooled… they have more time on their hands where maybe the jobs that they had put off and put off because they had to work all the time, they can actually come in and redo their landscaping. There’s been a lot of questions about landscaping.”