Ford says ‘good news coming’ for garden centres as industry suffers huge losses

The Province of Ontario released guidelines for businesses Thursday on how to safely reopen even as the battle against coronavirus continues across the country.

While no dates or timelines were provided for specific industries, there was some encouraging news during Premier Doug Ford’s daily briefing for garden centres and nurseries— an $8 billion industry that banks most of its business during a very small window during the spring season.

“Good news is coming very, very, very shortly,” said Ford, adding that backyard gardening is good for mental health. “Stay tuned, good news is coming for the garden centres.”

An announcement has been expected for some time to give Ontario’s growers and garden centres a chance to recoup the major losses they’ve suffered. For industry insiders, the wait has already been too long.

“This is a vital time for garden centres. They do 80 per cent of their sales [during] six weeks of business,” says Breakfast Television’s resident gardener Frank Ferragine. “Their biggest weekends [are] Mother’s Day and the long weekend. If they don’t get these sales, those plants are going to go to the compost pile.

Ferragine owns a garden centre himself and is also a spokesperson for Landscape Ontario, the trade association representing the industry. He has been working with the Ontario government to come up with a plan to reopen these businesses, many of which are small and family owned.

“Right now there’s about $450 million worth of plants waiting for the spring season,” says Ferragine. “Where are people going to get their plants safely and will these greenhouse growers have access to market? During the Easter season millions of dollars worth of plants have already been lost and those guys there really didn’t have a home.”

“Gardening is therapeutic,” adds Ferragine. “It’s what people need at this moment, they need a purpose, they need something to do.”

In the mean time, some garden centres have moved their sales online and are offering curbside pickup.

Fiesta Gardens in Toronto has managed to stay afloat thanks to online sales but the owner says he is concerned for the smaller suppliers.

“I fear for some of my growers, the smaller ones, the family oriented ones,” says co-owner Dino Virgona. “So we’re trying to make sure that we try to order off them as well [for online sales].”

Ferragine also points out that it’s unfair that large grocery chains are allowed to operate their in-house garden centres as a side interest, while smaller stores who sell plants as their sole source of income are forced to stay closed.

He hopes Ford’s promised “good news” does in fact come “very, very, very soon,” because if it doesn’t, he fears small and independent garden businesses will be yet another economic causality of the COVID-19 pandemic

But Virgona remains highly optimistic that things will bounce back, even if they are allowed to open a few weeks later in their peak sales month of May.

“In the past we’ve had some pretty bad weather for the first couple of weeks of May and everything just [gets pushed back],” he says. “So lets just pretend it’s bad weather and [hopefully] by Mother’s Day Ford will say ‘ok, the garden centres can open’ and it will just be like a two week delay. That’s how I look at it.”