With spring ready to be sprung and our region coming out of one of the harshest winters in recent memory, the opening day for a garden center served as a welcome look ahead towards warmer days to come.
That warmth didn’t come just from the heat trapped in one of their many greenhouses, but also from Kumarie Lal, owner of Kumarie’s Garden Market, who held the opening day event as a way to commemorate their fifth year in business.
Millville City officials like Public Safety Director Sherman Taylor were on hand to celebrate the market’s continued success.
“She’s doing a great job,” Taylor said. “She’s been in business for a little while now – just growing and growing and growing – no pun intended.”
Lal said things were quite different a the Main Street location when she first arrived at the property with her husband and family.
“It was literally a junk yard,” Lal said. “It was mountains of tires, mountains of cans, mountains of bottles, mountains of boats.”
Since they were coming to the land and the plans for the nursery from an organic point of view, the clean-up process was even more daunting. She said her husband and their children pulled everything out by hand in order to be sure the refuse was disposed of properly and that the land was cleaned completely.
She said they then had the land analyzed to be sure it was clean and free from contaminates, and even after finding it was cleared, she had it checked again and checked again, just to be sure.
“I had them do it a couple times before we actually planted,” she said.
The nursery, on several acres of land and multiple greenhouses, grows their own crops like pumpkins, watermelon and bok choy, along with flowers and ornamental plants.
Her customers, Lal said, keep coming back for that homegrown approach.
“They want local food grown,” she said. “They want local flowers.”
The market also serves as a place for a community of gardeners to learn from each other through workshops and classes, and Kumarie’s offers a community supported agriculture plan, or CSA, where individuals can buy a yearly share in the program and receive variety boxes of produce each week over the course of the growing season.
“It’s amazing to see how the community embraced us,” she said. “It’s what I have always been seeking for. This is what we want. We finally found it.”
For more information about Kumarie’s Garden Market and their programs, find them on Facebook.
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