Photo via Facebook / Minor's Garden Center
Family-owned and operated, Minor’s Garden Center has served Milwaukee’s North Side for decades. The vast, well-stocked garden center is a haven for green thumbs, carrying a wide assortment of perennials, annuals, shrubs, trees, evergreens, and hard-to-find plants. Minor’s also offers firewood, sod, hay and bulk mulch and compost.
The garden center stocks its retail store by maintaining four nurseries throughout the Milwaukee area.
Pam Minor, who owns Minor’s with her husband Kurt, feels the business’s location in the city’s Granville neighborhood is ideal for customers. “We’re kind of in the middle of a lot of different areas,” she noted, adding that the garden center prides itself on the quality and variety of its plants.
Kurt’s father, Don Minor, started the business in 1949. The company moved to its current location, 7777 N. 76th St., in the mid-1970s.
A popular destination for landscapers, Minor’s also includes a wholesale Contractor Sales division. Minor says that the two divisions “complement each other very nicely.” The Minor’s website, www.minorsgardencenter.com, offers plant and lawn care advice.
Like most businesses, Minor’s had to make adjustments to their business operations, including offering a curbside pickup service, during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was a learning experience, for sure,” Minor said. With many people working from home and staying indoors more, however, gardening sales boomed. “We were really fortunate,” she added. The garden center is now fully open to the public.
Some unusual plants Minor’s carries include pompom and spiral junipers. Arbor vitae, a plant which functions as a deer repellent, is a particularly hot item this year. “We can’t even keep them in stock,” Minor noted.
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Minor hopes the do-it-yourself ethos of growing one’s own plants and vegetables—something more Americans seemed to embrace during the pandemic—is not just a passing trend.
“We’re hoping we can keep that momentum going,” she said.
