Garden centre owner’s lockdown diary
Prior to lockdown, gardeners rushed to buy up every green thing in nurseries all over New Zealand. Gillian Thrum, who owns a popular garden centre in Havelock North, reveals how it looked – and felt – from the other side.
Havelock North’s Green Door’s Gillian Thrum on keeping things growing.
The lockdown period was bizarre. There’s been three quite distinct periods to it. From the moment that we first heard we were to close, and through the following three days when it was unclear just what we, as a business, were able to do was an incredibly intense period.
Firstly, there was the enormity of the whole country closing down and the worry of whether we’d left it too late. We watch a lot of BBC News and the rate at which the virus was spreading was worrying. I can remember the numbers climbing in Wuhan and how high they appeared. At that stage, little did we know of what was going to befall America and what appears to be looming for the African and perhaps Asian continents.
Green Door has been established for 20 years and we have 17 staff. The how-to part of looking after staff was relatively quickly allayed by the announcement of the wage subsidy which has completely underpinned the recovery of the business and enabled us to keep all our staff on full pay.
Next came the reaction from the New Zealand public who quickly came to the realisation (more quickly than we did, I might say) that they were going to be staying at home for the foreseeable future… and what were they going to do?
So they came in droves. Waves and waves of customers. Purchases started with vegetables. More vegetables than anyone could ever imagine were sold. We stocked with everything we could get and as we deal with three suppliers, we were able to get three deliveries in before we closed. Each day we topped up and by the end of each day we were empty. On the last day we ran out at 11am and customers were simply helping themselves from the trolleys as they come in the door.
Whilst the veges were selling, compost, garden mix and seed mix were also flying off the pallets until there was none left.
Once the veges started to dwindle, customers who had never sown a seed in their lives stripped the seed stands of pretty much everything that would grow through the winter.
Then it was the turn of the herbs. Every single herb went, apart from a lone sage that managed to get mismothered down the path! Everything.
Then colour, perennials and annuals alike. On the Wednesday we put the bulbs and perennials on special as many of these wouldn’t last what could be 12 weeks. The government had given us 12 weeks of subsidy. Did that mean they thought we would be closed for 12 weeks? No-one knew, but we did know that if we didn’t
Once the veges started to dwindle, customers who had never sown a seed in their lives stripped the seed stands of pretty much everything that would grow through the winter.