Generations of growth

At age 10, Nick Gerace got his first paycheck from Welby Gardens, the greenhouse his great-grandfather founded in 1948. After growing up in the company, playing in the dirt, Gerace got involved with planting and watering at a young age.

By the time he was halfway through high school, he knew he wanted to spend his career in the family greenhouse. The day after he graduated from Colorado State University in May 2010 with his bachelor's degree in soil and crop sciences, he joined Welby full-time.

Since then, Gerace has been committed to growing his family's legacy for producing high-quality bedding plants under the Hardy Boys brand, along with Hardystarts rooted liners. Today, as director of wholesale operations, he shares ownership of the fourth-generation family business with his dad, Marty, CEO, and his cousin, Dan, the production manager.

"Our main goal is to produce the highest quality plant material that we can produce," Gerace says. That requires a hardworking team of growers using the best inputs to produce a "staggering diversity" of plants for Welby's customers, which include independent garden centers and local landscapers.

When Gerace joined the operation, it spanned one million square feet of production space across three locations in Denver. In 2019, the company closed one facility, downsizing to about 570,000 square feet and refining its focus on quality. "It cut down on our overhead and made our business run a lot more efficiently," Gerace says. "We are more profitable now than we ever were back then."

Starting young

Before Gerace joined, Welby used to ship finished plants into areas like Texas and Arizona with earlier springs, which extended the greenhouse's growing season. As that market shrunk over time, Welby introduced a young plant division to fill the seasonal void.

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Source: Greenhosue Management