We Are Better With Plants - Community Spotlight on Groovy Plants Ranch
In this series of features, we talk with others in the community who work with plants for a living about their businesses and how plants play a major role in their lives.
Jared and Liz are the owners of Groovy Plants Ranch, a perennial, annual, and tropical plant haven in Marengo, Ohio, where a good number of their plants are craft-grown by their talented team. Read on to learn more about them and Groovy Plants Ranch!
Jared and Liz, the owners of Groovy Plants Ranch.
How did you get started with the idea for Groovy Plants Ranch? What are your backgrounds like in relation to plants?
J - I started Groovy Plants Ranch as a landscape company. I started my career at Fortmeyer & Sons Greenhouse in Delaware, Ohio, and as I began to learn more about plants, I decided I would start landscaping. I was going to school for landscaping as well at Columbus State and started out of my 1980 El Camino—no joke! The more I worked at Fortmeyer & Sons, the more I found I had a knack for plants, especially remembering Latin and not having too hard of a time growing them. As I learned, that landscaping business morphed into growing more of my own plants. Then, I started growing succulents—as a college student, I wanted a crop that I could grow that didn’t require much in the way of care, and succulents had not hit the market in a big way yet. I collected innumerable varieties, and I started propagating them and selling them at markets, which is what paid for my first greenhouse. The first greenhouse paid for two more, and the rest is history.
L - I joined Jared with Groovy Plants Ranch in 2015 after I finished grad school and we got married. We met when his business had already started to really grow. I have my masters in fine arts, and my undergrad in arts education. Before Jared, I was destined to be an arts professor. My love of plants didn’t start until I met Jared, but plants and art—I think there are a lot of things that are similar between creating art and growing plants. I am also very right-brained for an artist, so I was able to bring a lot of organization to GPR, and together, Jared and I were able to move his business from having a couple of small greenhouses at his parents’ place to our current retail location. We make a great team together!
Being a company that grows many of their own plants for sale, what is that process like? How long does it take to go from starting a plant via propagation/seed to being able to have a sellable product?
L - An herb or vegetable has an 8-week turnaround time, while some of our other crops can take up to 2 or 3 years before they’re sellable. Jared is the horticulturist between the two of us, but the long answer short is that it depends on the plant, and we do all of it! We grow things that take a short time, and we grow things that take a long time!
J - A lot of houseplants take a lot longer than people realize, but it all depends on what you’re doing. Cloning is relatively quick, and growing from seed takes longer—for example, growing basil from seed takes about 6 to 8 weeks to grow into a 3.5” planter. My pet projects take the longest; you can’t buy them in the trade. I ordered seeds today for hardy cyclamens, hardy yucca, things that I want to grow ultimately for my rock garden and to sell—something I really enjoy is rock gardening! I want to sell them as “finished plants” in a 4” planter, which takes about a year turnaround time.
L - In Ohio, where we’re based out of, we grow plants year-round, so we have heated greenhouses. Growing in the winter, things take a bit longer because we have less daylight and it’s not quite as warm.
The grooviest Volkswagen bus ever!
If you had to pick one favorite tropical and one favorite perennial, what plants would those be and why?
J - I’m going to hit both with one plant! As a gardener, my favorite tropical/perennial plant is the banana basjoo, or the Japanese Mountain Banana, and you can grow them in Zone 5 with mulching for the first couple of years. They’re a tropical plant that’s hardy—it’s a true banana, but you’ll never get fruit on it in central Ohio—but with some fertilizing and plenty of sunshine in a nice spot, you can get fifteen to twenty feet of growth in a single growing season, and they return year after year. We have one clump at our house that’s at least a decade old, but I’m hoping to plant at least 100 more on the property this year, because it’s such an exotic look.
L - I’m going to just not answer this question at all, and tell you my favorite thing to garden is vegetable gardening! I get the most satisfaction out of vegetable gardening—I was doing that before I met Jared, and I am still doing that! I love the act of planting a seed and watching it turn into a tiny little plant, and then having that plant in my garden and harvesting fruit from it in mid to late summer. I love getting fresh tomatoes out of the garden—you can’t beat a homegrown tomato on a piece of toast with mayonnaise, bacon, and lettuce in the summer. We also have two small children, Lily and Trillium, who are 3 and 1, and they help me in the garden. Because they’re little, they really like the instant gratification of pulling a piece of fruit off a plant they grew.
In addition to succulents and cacti, Groovy Plants has a good selection of tropicals.
What is one of your biggest takeaways from owning a business centered around plants?
J - Being in the plant business, you meet a lot of people, and for the most part, folks who are coming in to shop at your business are happy, and that happiness more or less revolves around the act of growing things. I mostly got into this because of my appreciation for the aesthetic of plants. As I’ve done it more and more, I’ve really come to appreciate how impactful it is in people’s daily lives—I saw a lot of it during the pandemic, but I already knew that before then, having worked for over a decade in the trade and helping people design their personal escapes. It’s quite obvious it’s a huge part of people’s mental health—it’s part of living a happy life. For me, I’m happy to be a part of that process.
L - Something that I really appreciate about our business in particular is that GPR is a melting pot of people who just love plants. We have a HUGE variety of people who shop in our store. I love seeing younger people from the city and housewives from the country. There’s a mingling of people you don’t see a lot of times in the same place at our store. I really love that. I love that plants are a commonality for a lot of different kinds of people to connect with each other.
The Potter’s Saloon, where you can pick a planter for your new plant, and you can plant it directly on-site, if you choose to!
What are some of your favorite aspects of both living and operating in the Marengo/Delaware area?
L - I love where we live! Where we live is squarely country. We have land and we have trees, and I love that we are near beautiful horses and that I get to see the fields getting plowed in the spring and harvested in the fall. We’re a three minute drive from the highways, so I can be anywhere in Columbus in about 25 minutes. We get the best of being in the country, but also living near a metropolitan area. I love the people and community in the Marengo area, especially the community of businesspeople in our area—everyone is so kind.
J - I used to say if I ever opened a garden center, it would be in Sunbury—I always thought it was a nice town and would be a good place to set up shop. Fate landed us ten minutes from Sunbury, and not because we tried! As far as the customer base in our shop, we don’t get much in the way of window shoppers. It’s almost an intentional visit. If people are taking the time and effort to come, there’s a pretty good chance we’ve already got someone who values what we do, and I enjoy working with those people.
L - We have people who come to our shop on a regular basis who don’t necessarily buy something every time. They enjoy being here, and we love that too! We like that the people who come to GPR are plant lovers and that they tend to be really cool people to chat with.
Groovy Plants has an absolutely amazing selection of perennials for outdoor gardening.
What does a typical day at the ranch look like for the two of you?
J - In the morning, I make my coffee, have breakfast with the kids, and what the rest of the day looks like is dependent on what time of year it is. In the spring, I’ll meet with whatever crew is working that morning and going over the schedule for the day. I’ll go around and check crops and thermostats in the greenhouses, making sure that nothing was eaten or destroyed overnight. I’ve been doing a lot of construction as our business is growing—I’ve been building greenhouses lately. If I’m lucky, I might be able to grow or propagate some plants that the rest of the crew might not have time for, or I might plant a few things around the grounds to continue adding to our space. I’ve been adding a lot of Japanese Maples to the grounds—I try to plant one plant a day outside, if I’m able to.
L - My day starts out with getting the kids fed. While they’re eating breakfast, I take care of the business communications—I monitor most of the social media accounts for messages, along with public-facing emails. I also do a lot of back-end stuff, like bookkeeping and some ordering. I work as a support person for our upper-management. I spend my afternoons being a mom, which is wonderful. In the spring, I work in retail, and I love working the retail floor in the busy season. I also love teaching classes—we’re ramping our classes back up after two weird years of covid! I also schedule and facilitate activities for our customers and our community. I’m really excited about our schedule for this coming year.
With much of the current houseplant craze being attributed to millennials, do you see this trend coming full circle, with millennials starting to become interested in outdoor gardening with annuals and perennials?
J - It all depends on home-ownership and having the space to do things, but it would stand to reason that it would. The ice has already been broken with houseplants, and people are comfortable with plants. That was not a thing even 8 or 9 years ago—it was still being discussed how to get plants to millennials, and it happened on its own! I think it will [come full circle]. I’m particularly excited about it, because there’s a whole world beyond houseplants, and if people are interested, I’m ready to show them.
L - Anecdotally, we are seeing people who like houseplants renting or buying homes, and now they’re wanting to decorate their outside, and I’m noticing a lot of people starting with annuals in baskets or planters, because that seems easier than the whole yard. I would say there is also—maybe I’m making this up because vegetable gardening is my favorite—but, I’m also seeing a lot of interest in people growing their own food, so there is some vegetable container gardening happening.
J - Millennials are more environmentally-conscious than previous generations, and there’s so much you can do by renovating lawns that are ecological deserts and turning them into wildlife or pollinator habitats, which can be done with native plants and a variety of landscaping plants. If the trend towards environmental consciousness continues, that would include planting habitats.
One of Groovy Plant’s main greenhouses for their craft-grown cacti and succulents.
What is your best advice to someone who’s looking to getting into outdoor gardening?
L - My best advice is ask questions and just try!
J - Go to a respectable garden center with staff who are knowledgable and want to help you.
L - Go online, find a local garden center with good reviews. Don’t go to a big box garden center expecting them to be able to answer your questions.
J - There are some great programs and bloggers out there. Just to get your feet wet, start looking at plants and talk to professionals who know them.
L - Every area is different too! Zones are different, soil is different… the advice you would get in central Ohio would be different than the advice you would get, say, in southern Texas. Make sure when you are getting literature and help, that it’s appropriate to the area you’re in. If you’re in central Ohio, we have some great resources, one of which is us! We do quite a bit of education and will be planning some free-to-the-community classes about getting your feet wet with perennial gardening.
What do you envision the future of Groovy Plants Ranch looking like?
J - As far as the retail goes, I want to continue to grow retail in ways that are meaningful to me. I want to offer more variety of different plants that I love, from houseplants to perennials, and I want to challenge people on what plants they should have. I want to add more events as we move forward—we’re doing renovating on our space to accommodate much larger events. I want to renovate our grounds more and more to make our ranch a really beautiful place to be year-round to accent our growing facilities.
L - GPR is a physical location, but we also ship, and we are continuing to push the envelope on what we can safely sell [online], because that is what we love to do—we love to have plants that you may not be able to find everywhere, and to see them, and to touch them, and to bring them home with you. We want to give that experience to everyone, not just those who can make the drive to central Ohio. Something I know that will not change as we grow is our level of plant care and customer service! As we move to the future of GPR, we will still offer the same level of high-quality plants and continue to try to have excellent customer service with everyone who comes in.
J - It’s not that we have grand plans on expanding the business in a huge way—it’s more just polishing it. I think we already have a pearl, so we’re just polishing the pearl. I want to make it better and better in meaningful ways.
Photos provided by Jared & Liz. All photos taken by Ashley Wallace Photography for Groovy Plants Ranch.