Court’s Greenhouse no longer a perennial business

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Published on Thursday, June 16, 2016

Photo by Kira Paterson. After being open for 32 years, Jeanine Court has decided to close Court’s Greenhouse after this season is over.

By Kira Paterson

Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press

After 32 years in the greenhouse business, Jeanine Court has announced this as the last season for Court’s Greenhouse. At the end of June, the business will be closing for the year, like it usually does, but the doors will not open again next spring. 

Court started her business in 1984 in a small wooden greenhouse, intending only to grow enough for herself and her family. However, her thumb was greener than she knew and she had enough plants to supply her neighbours as well. From there, her hobby bloomed into a business that has influenced and supported a generation of gardeners in the area.

In 1987, she bought her first metal frame greenhouse and the business continued to grow until she had 14,000 square feet of greenhouse. 

The Court’s Greenhouse was a lot more than just flowers. Court provided starter vegetables for many colony farms. At one point, she also included trees, shrubs and decorative stoneware for gardens in her product line up. During the off-season, she grew seed potatoes for large scale farms, vegetables for local grocery stores and market garden stands and she dried flowers for craft and florist stores in Winnipeg.

Court provided products and horticultural support to areas ranging from Gladstone, to Carberry, to Neepawa and even to Brandon. She set up a greenhouse space Neepawa in 1989, selling from the Safeway parking lot and then the Co-op grocery store parking lot. The Neepawa sales continued to grow and were the majority of her business up to 2013, when she stopped setting up in Neepawa. Court’s was one of the main suppliers of plants to the Neepawa area while she was set up there. She also had a location in Gladstone for about 12 years, but she made the decision to stop selling in Gladstone and Neepawa because the business was getting too spread out. After her Neepawa greenhouse space closed, she continued to serve that community by producing flowers for the Riverside Cemetery. She grew and transplanted over 70,000 petunias each year for the past three years, contributing to the cemetery’s reputation of being a beautiful space.

Court contributed significantly to the seasonal employment in the Plumas area. She’s had as many as 10 employees at once to transplant seedlings and eight during the open season. The greenhouse always had a family-like atmosphere among the people working there.

For over 30 years, she looked forward to receiving the new seed catalogues and choosing what plants she wanted, but now, she’s decided it’s time to quit the greenhouse and focus on the other family business. The Court family also runs the Court Seeds agriculture business, which keeps her busy with administration and accounting year-round. Court said it has been a good business and she enjoyed it while it lasted. The one thing she’ll miss the most is the interaction with customers. 

Now, she plans to sell the greenhouse structures to someone who has a place to put them. She will continue to garden, but only for herself. “Once a gardener, always a gardener,” Court concluded.