Anderson’s Seed and Garden, located at 69 W. Center Street in downtown Logan, has been at the same spot for the past 81 years.
For many people, it is the place to go not only to purchase garden plants and supplies but to find answers to perplexing growing challenges.
Owned today by Mark and Ronnette Anderson, the business sees new customers all the time as well as a steady stream of returning customers who have been turning to Anderson’s for garden advice for years.
“What we really offer is personalized service and solutions to gardeners’ problems,” Mark said. “That’s really what we offer at Anderson’s and that’s what keeps bringing customers back, because they come in, they’ve got a problem, and we help them find a solution.”
It was Mark’s grandmother who started the business in 1942, though a lot has evolved with it over the years, including some name changes.
“She was renting about 500 square-feet of the building to start off with,” Mark said. “And then as her business grew, she started renting more and more space and then all of a sudden she had the whole building.” Eventually, she purchased it.
“We’ve been in the same location since 1942,” he said, explaining it originally was called Logan Seed and Feed but was later changed to Anderson’s Feed and Seed. When his grandmother passed away in 1976, she divided the business between Mark’s father and his uncle. The brothers also ran a freight line that eventually went away, but the garden shop remained.
Mark’s dad bought the other half of the business in the late 1980s, the same decade that another name change was made, this time Anderson’s Seed and Garden. Mark and Ronnette purchased the business in 1999.
Today, the garden center sits on about an acre of land, with some 7,000 square-feet of retail space and 10,000 square-feet of greenhouse space (three greenhouses in total) and 10,000 square-feet of nursery space. The nursery is attached to the greenhouses.
“We actually have our own parking lot too, which makes us unique (in downtown),” Mark said, noting the business also employs 25. “And we’re using every single body,” he said, because this is the busiest time of year for the garden center.
“But every month of the year we’ve got some kind of event going on,” he said. “Whether it’s our compost tea party or mad money sale or Christmas open house or ladies’ nights in October. We do some pretty fun stuff.”
Mark further discussed the business and some of its events during a Q&A with The Herald Journal:
Is there anything Anderson’s specializes in?Really, what we specialize in is not so much what other full-service garden centers have to offer — we have all of that, of course — but what we really offer is personalized service and solutions to gardeners’ problems. That’s really what we offer at Anderson’s and that’s what keeps bringing customers back, because they come in, they’ve got a problem, and we help them find a solution.
They bring in a sample of their lawn, they’ve got a piece of their tree that’s not doing very well, they’ve got a tomato that’s struggling. We help diagnose what’s going on with the plant and figure out the best solution to help them be successful with it, whether it’s a fertilizer, just some TLC, or maybe an insect we have to get under control. That’s really what we specialize in, helping our customers solve problems.
What is popular this season?That is determined a lot by media, like whether Martha Stewart is excited about tuberous this year and then everybody wants to do that. I wouldn’t say it’s like pop culture, but it kind of is. When you have those national experts talking about certain things, we will see people get excited about them. And it’s almost something different every year.
This year everybody wants lavender. Last year it was purple coneflowers, different types of cone flowers. The year before that it was something else. There are always trends that we see come through the marketplace. We try to stay on top of those before they happen, but sometimes we can react to them quickly and other times it’s a little bit slower.
What classes does your business offer?We partner with Utah State and they come to teach classes here in our classroom. We do a six-week, two-hour a week basic gardening class that covers everything from soils to starting seeds to pruning to pest control and everything in between. We usually do that in January through the first part of March. We might do this in the fall as well, because it’s a really great opportunity for new gardeners as well as more advanced gardeners to learn some new things. … $40 covers all the materials for the class. I can do up to 35 people per class, and sometimes we have to do a second session of classes because we have so many people who are interested.
What other events are you excited about?We just did our planting event a couple of weeks ago, which is where we provide free soil and free labor to plant people’s planters for the spring and summer. They bring their containers in or buy new ones, and they buy the flowers, and then we plant them for them. That’s a really fun event.
We participate heavily in the Cache Valley Home and Garden Show. … We also do a lot during the holidays. We have our holiday open house, which is really kind of a winter wonderland; the whole store is all about Christmas. If you’ve never been in at Christmastime, you really can’t fathom it until you do.
This year we’re doing a giant pumpkin festival, where Utah’s giant pumpkin growers are going to come in and do their annual weigh-off here. We’re looking forward to that at the end of September. We’ll have probably 25 or 30 people bring in 1,000-pound pumpkins or greater and weighing them off. We’ll have pumpkins all over the place. We’ll have artists carving pumpkins, we’ll have activities for kids, such as pumpkin painting; we’ll also have pumpkin spice root beer, coffee or ale … all kinds of different stuff for people to try.
What are your favorite plants and edibles?I do have my favorites. ... Vegetable-wise, Tasty Green Cucumber is the best cucumber ever. I can eat one every single day. Last year, I grew a new variety of corn. It’s called Eden, it is a white corn, and it is to die for, like the tastiest corn I have ever grown. ... For flowers, we have a type of petunia, a super petunia called a Vista. This petunia is an amazing plant. It will grow 3 or 4 feet across and blooms all summer long. It will bloom all summer without deadheading or anything. … We have all of these here.
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