Sound design

Photo courtesy of Growing by Creekside

Gardening with Creekside, based in Dallas, North Carolina, is a grower-retailer serving their surrounding community. They also have a gardening-focused YouTube channel with over 70,000 subscribers where they publish five videos a week. Their video strategy began in 2014 when they were trying to sell mums before a hurricane hit and posted videos to their Facebook page. That worked and it’s now turned into its own revenue-driving business.

“It’s turning into its own business unto itself,” co-owner Jenny Simpson says. “Our nursery is so remote that it was an attempt to reach local customers to let them know about Creekside, the products we have, the plants we grow because we were in that weird time when we didn’t know how to advertise.” Jenny runs Creekside with her husband Jerry.

“Now we have people coming from all over the country to visit Creekside,” she says.

For greenhouse structures, Creekside relies on Atlas Greenhouse. They purchased two snow arches to support the large number of hanging baskets they produce. They also recently purchased a newer-style A-frame gutter-connected facility.

“We’re using that one as the main area for our retail shopping,” Jerry says. “They put that one up for us last fall.”

Jenny and Jerry both say their Atlas sales rep, Heath Spradley, is a major reason why they do business with Atlas and will continue to do so in the future. The snow arches are a perfect example of that relationship and Heath’s expertise paying off.

“We’ll tell Heath what our situation is, what we want to do with the product and then Heath says ‘okay, let’s go this route,’” Jenny says. “We’re in North Carolina — we don’t get a lot of snow. But the greenhouses we have are rated for snow loads because he knows that we have tons of hanging baskets and can take our growing conditions, our needs as a grower and match us with the best product that they have. Every time we’ve needed anything or there’s a question, they’ve been wonderful.”

Jerry adds that, amid supply chain issues in the last year or so, Atlas hasn’t had any delays.

“We haven’t had any issues with them at all,” he says. “There were zero.”

“We work with Laura and Aaron from Garden Answer, another huge YouTube gardener,” Jenny says. “They had just an unheated hoophouse and they were watching our videos when we were putting together our production houses, so Jerry got them in contact with Heath. He got them all set up with the conversion kit they needed. For me, Atlas is so great to work with because they listen to you — no matter the size of your company.”