By Ryan C. Christiansen
When Jane Mattheis talks about her work, you’d think she’d died and gone to heaven. “It’s therapeutic,” she says while she works beneath the boxelder tree in her front yard and listens to birdsong. Roosters crow, fans blow, and water flows in the place where Mattheis clocks in for work each day, but for the owner of Janie Marie’s Greenhouse north of Moorhead on Highway 75, “It’s not a business,” she said. “It’s a way of life.”
Mattheis started her journey years ago while growing up in Minneapolis, Minn. While attending college in Bemidji, Minn, and her brother, Art Hulteng (now deceased), was attending North Dakota State University in Fargo, N.D. “I was looking through his course catalog,” she said, “and I saw Horticulture, and I thought, ‘You can make a living with plants?’ I didn’t know that Horticulture even existed.” She signed up, she said, because “I’ve always called myself a city girl with a country heart, and because I just love digging in the dirt. I love growing things.” She graduated from NDSU, and in 1985, she moved with her husband to a farmstead a few miles north of Georgetown, Minn., where she raised three daughters, including Josie, now 27, Samantha 25, and Katie 22.
How did she start a business of her own? “I wanted to stay home with my kids,” she said, “and I needed to find a way to do it, and so that’s why I grew myself some vegetables for a little bit of extra income.” She started Valley Veggies, and built her first greenhouse with her own hands. “I came out with a shovel,” she said, “and dug my footings. Then I got some cheap lumber, studded up the walls, and found some old windows for twenty five bucks and framed them in.”
Later, she moved beyond vegetables, she said, to dried flowers, which she produced for a cooperative in Rothsay, Minn. “I had everything into dried flowers at that point,” she said, “with drip irrigation, black plastic mulch, the whole nine yards. The whole barn was full of flowers hanging upside down, and I had transplants going for that, too.” But when the dried flowers business dried up, she shifted gears again, she said, to selling live vegetable plants, annuals, and perennials from her greenhouse. “Every year people would stop in,” she said, “and so I would do a little more, and it kind of exploded on me. About three or four years ago, I looked around, and said, “This is not a hobby anymore.” Janie Marie’s as a business is pretty new, but I’ve been doing this for 20 years or better.”
Now with three greenhouses, the newest one a “dream greenhouse” manufactured by a company in Holland, Mattheis has just about as much as she can handle, she said. What’s been the hard part? “There was nothing hard,” she said, laughing. “The business is entwined with my life. It just evolved from me doing what I do. It just happened, but you got to know what you’re doing.”
Mattheis sells a lot of vegetable transplants, she said, including tomato varieties like Jetsetter, “a great, good-sized, reliable, semi-early, beautiful tomato,” and Celebrity, “a variety that’s older than I am,” she said. She has Lizzano, an All-America Selection award-winning tomato, and also Giant Belgium, Goliath, and even Amish Paste, which draws customers from as far away as Valley City, N.D. She has golden cherry tomatoes this year, too. She has thirty-five varieties of tomatoes. “There’s a lot packed in here,” she said, and she trials new varieties every year. “If they pan out,” she said, “they’re here again.”
Mattheis keeps a notebook to jot down suggestions, she said, for the most part, figuring out what people will buy is a crap shoot. “Trying to predict what people will buy is very difficult,” she said. “And I have to be sure not to order all of my seeds on the same day, or else I will look down and everything will be red or everything will be pink, depending on what mood I’m in.”
The work year begins in December, Mattheis said, when she starts ordering plugs. By January, she’s seeding petunias under the lights inside the house, and “it just snowballs from there,” she said. “You’re transplanting all of these seedlings until you’re going to lose your mind. Everything drives you nuts when you’re in the middle of it, but it’s all temporary. Right now [in May] it’s water, water, water, water, water, water, water, but that will be over pretty soon, too.”
In February, she fires up her first greenhouse, and Mattheis aims to open for business by May 1, she said, but she usually has customers knocking on her door before the sign is up. She doesn’t mind. “It’s really nice to see stuff walking out,” she said, “because as the month goes on, I will sometimes be out here on a hot, sunny day at 7:00 a.m. watering and I won’t finish up until the afternoon.” But watering isn’t the only reason she likes to sell out. “I want to get to the lake,” she admits, where she doesn’t plant a single thing. “Are you kidding? I lay on the beach,” she said. “And fish.” She does have vegetable gardens on the farm, and she makes it home to mow the grass and hoe the weeds so that in the fall, she can fill her freezer full of vegetables. “But at the lake?” she said. “It’s the only the place in the world where I can totally relax.”
In August, Mattheis transforms into what her boyfriend calls “the best-looking hired hand around,” she said, when she helps him to harvest wheat, “and then it will be the beans and working the ground,” she said. Around the holidays, she enjoys some time off.
It’s just enough to keep her busy. “It’s as big as I want it to be,” Mattheis said. In addition to running her greenhouse, Mattheis also raises poultry, she said, and sells hatching eggs for Light Sussex, Buff Sussex, and Blue Laced Red Wyandotte chickens. “I ship my eggs all over the country,” she said, and sells them on eBay, where she’s sold eggs for as high as $89 per dozen. “I watched that auction and I was like, ‘What a bunch of idiots,’” she said, laughing.
Growing things, especially plants, will never grow old, Mattheis said, because she’s always learning something. “You’re always figuring it out,” she said, “because a greenhouse will have a hot spot and a cool spot, a high light and a low light, and some things like it wet, some things like it dry, some things like it acid, and some things like it alkali, and so over the course of years, you figure out what a plant wants, but you’ve got to know your greenhouse and all of your little microclimates, and you’ve got to know your plants.”
Mattheis said she gets a lot of satisfaction from knowing that others enjoy her plants, but what has given her the most joy, she said, has been being able to stay home to raise her kids. “That was huge for me,” she said, “because I wasn’t going to have somebody else raise them. I was here and I was busy, but I was here for them.” She continues to use a decorated metal toolbox as her cash register, the gift that her daughters made for her for Mother’s Day years ago. “They’re proud of me,” she said. “And I’m lucky. Do you make your own luck? I don’t know. My ex worked hard, too, you know. That was his contribution to my being able to stay home.”
The children’s playhouse is now a chicken coop and the kids have moved on. Do they have green thumbs, too? “Not a one of them,” she said, laughing, “But I’ve got a granddaughter now,
and so there’s still hope.”