Sunnyside Nursery: A space to learn

What sets Sunnyside Nursery apart from other garden centers in the area?

One of the biggest things we strive for is customer service, and we really try to go above and beyond to help the customers in all ways possible. And one of those ways is classes. Our classes have really exploded in the last two seasons. Some of our classes we’ve had over 100 people attend. And even this summer I’d say we averaged 30-plus. But in spring and fall especially, the classes can be anywhere from 60 to 100.
 

How do you promote the classes to get such a big turn out?

We don’t do advertising really in the paper anymore. We hired a marketing manager last year. She’s doing more with Facebook. We’ve revamped our website this year, and we have an e-club membership that’s over 4,000 or 4,500 now. We do classes almost every Saturday January through June.

We don’t do them quite every Saturday in the summer, but then we pick back up again [on Labor Day], and it’ll be weekly pretty much until we do wreath making in November. And all of our class attendees get 20 percent off whatever the class is about that week.
 

Do you charge for the classes?

Ninety percent of them are free. The only time we charge is if it’s actually a hands-on class. We get 60 to 100 people for the lecture classes, which most of them are, and we don’t limit them. We do encourage people to sign up just so we have an idea, but we still usually have anywhere from 20 to 30 people that show up that didn’t sign up.
 

What has been one of Sunnyside Nursery’s biggest successes in the past few years?

We’ve expanded quite a bit. We have offered a lot more area for plant material, for shopping. A few years ago we slowly added a small gift shop; it’s gotten bigger now. The houseplants, we used to never do houseplants; those have picked up pretty well also. A few years back, we bought another section of land across the nursery for more parking, so that’s definitely helped. But the customer service is the big thing, and we have a great selection of plant material. We hand water. We fertilize regularly to keep stock looking good. And the owner, Steve Smith, he writes a column for Everett, WA., which is a city nearby us, just north of Seattle. He writes the gardening column now. So we’ve gotten more customers from that column.
 

What is your favorite part of your job?

Oh gosh. I like ordering but I’d have to say the customers. I’ve been there long enough now that there’s a lot of regulars, and I see a lot of them before they had kids. And it makes me feel really old but a few of them in the last year now, their kids are having kids.
 

What changes have you seen in the industry?

The newer generation doesn’t know as much about gardening. More people are in the workforce, and maybe didn’t have mom and dad who were gardeners. Then they want instant gratification. Our container sales, not empty containers but planted-up containers, those sales have really picked up. And a lot of people don’t have the time to garden intensively as much as they used to. So we do have a lot more people coming in now with requests for more low-maintenance plants.
 

Anything I didn’t ask you that you wanted to mention?

Well probably the first thing that comes to mind just off the cuff is the amount of people that think it’s an easy job. That we just stand around and sell pretty little flowers. It’s a great industry to be in and I love it, but it’s a lot of hard work, too. Anybody who’s worked in a nursery knows that. But it’s wonderful. It would be really hard to go back and work indoors again.