Growing fast

ROYAL CITY — It’s one thing to grow and sell flowers. Owning a complete nursery is something else altogether, especially when you have only months to build it.

“The learning curve has been really steep,” said Kylie Gray-Eilers. “I just always tell myself that every day is a new day.”

Gray-Eilers isn’t a stranger to raising plants; her Gray Girl Farms has sold dahlias for almost eight years, and she holds a Dahlia Days festival every year in October. The dahlia operation was beginning to reach the point where she needed either to scale it back or grow, she said. So when she learned that Robin Prchal, owner of Emerald Desert Nursery in Quincy, was fixing to retire, Gray-Eilers decided it was time to expand.

“I was a customer at Emerald Desert for years,” she said. “There was a huge need in the industry that Robin filled. It’s been great to kind of pick up where she left off and help the customers along the way.”

Before closing down, Prchal sold off all of her inventory, but Gray-Eilers and her husband brought the infrastructure – the greenhouses, irrigation, tree pots and so forth – back to their property and set it up more or less the same it had been at Emerald Desert, she said. Some of the employees from Emerald Desert also took jobs at Gray Girl.

“The employees who came to work for me are fabulous,” Gray-Eilers said. “Robin had top-notch employees, and now I have top-notch ones too.”

Gray-Eilers and her new team had their work cut out for them. 

“Luckily, my husband loves semis and trucks,” she said. “They just kept loading it on flatbeds and hauling it over … We broke ground the last week in January and our first truckloads of product for here maybe March 10.”

Gray Girl mostly sells wholesale, she said, although a fair number of home gardeners make the drive out to Royal City to check out her inventory. The question isn’t what she has at the nursery, Gray-Eilers said, but what doesn’t she have.

“We have evergreens, maple trees, bushes, shrubs, perennials, annuals, grass, roses, everything you could think of and more,” she said.

Which of those things sells when can be impossible to predict, Gray-Eilers said. Last week, she was hit out of the blue by a run on hornbeam trees.

“I sold a bunch of them,” she said. “By the third or fourth phone call, I was like, are you guys bidding a job? And no, it wasn’t (a single job). I sold out of them, which was so random. It’s been like that; it ebbs and flows.” 

Unlike the dahlia operation, Gray-Eilers doesn’t grow her own inventory; she has a number of distributors she buys from. But she’s picky about the quality, she said.

“It’s not something you’re getting at your average (chain store),” she said. “We’re bringing in really nice, large plants. I’m just proud of the whole thing.”

Gray Girl Farms & Nursery

11737 Road E SW 

Royal City

Monday-Friday 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Saturday 8 a.m.-1 p.m.

www.graygirlfarms.com

    Some of the inventory at Gray Girl Farms nursery is staged around the loading dock. Gray Girl Farms gets mostly bulk orders but also sells to the general public.
  

    Kylie Gray-Eilers shows a Blue Chiffon Rose of Sharon at her nursery at Gray Girl Farms.