Inside Gardener's
Securing a brighter future by building community, empowering gardeners, and cultivating new generations of earth stewards.
Securing a brighter future by building community, empowering gardeners, and cultivating new generations of earth stewards.
-Mission Statement since 1990
Will Raap spearheads the launch of Gardener's Supply Company as a catalog mail order company offering innovative solutions from around the world for better, easier gardening. We’re one of the first to offer enabling products for aging and physically challenged gardeners.
Our first offices, test garden, and warehouse open in Winooski, VT. Products for composting, weather protection, water conservation, organic gardening, and physically limited gardeners prove to be the most popular.
Gardener's Supply establishes an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), encouraging every employee to "think and act like an owner," because now they are! We move to a new building on the site of an abandoned slaughterhouse in Burlington's Intervale – a degraded, 300-acre floodplain. We organize work parties to clean up decades of illegal dumping so that our new "backyard" can become a center for community gardening and food production.
Recognizing an opportunity to divert tens of thousands of tons of yard and food waste from the local landfill, Gardener's Supply establishes the Intervale Compost Project. Quickly becoming the largest composting operation in VT, it restores fertility to 100s of acres in the Intervale floodplain and leads to the development of the Intervale Center — now an independent non-profit national leader in organic farming, community agriculture, and land restoration.
Gardener's Supply dives into product design and development, opening a small manufacturing factory in Vermont and paving the way to hundreds of best-selling gardening solutions — like our Vertex supports, SunLite® Gardens, lifetime aluminum corners, and signature cedar garden beds.
Visitors welcome! Expanding our small retail store into a full-service garden center strengthens our local presence and helps us promote a stronger local food system. This leads to the development of the Intervale Community Farm — one of the first community-supported agriculture (CSA) membership farms in the country and now the largest in Vermont.
