The 68-year-old Pine Island man is known throughout the town for “Joel’s Greenhouse,” which has been a staple of the community. The business, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, has grown from a simple, small setup in 1971 to having 12 greenhouses over 12,000 square feet.
“Time just goes so fast, and it speeds up when we get older,” Flemke said of being in business for half a decade. “It doesn’t seem real.”
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Flemke grew up around avid gardeners. The passion was passed down from his grandmother to his parents and then to him.
His first garden was just little plants, such as tomatoes, on the window sill. It slowly started growing from there into opening his first greenhouse.
It wasn’t much, but it was a start. The first greenhouse was 19 feet square, and his father helped with construction. With the aid of an extension cable, light bulb and an oil burner, Joel’s Greenhouse was up and running.
Flemke said they started out selling tomatoes and cabbages and a few basic flowers before they began growing.
“We just started slowly and kept adding little by little, you know, always a little more product,” Flemke said. “It just was a slow process, slow and steady. We never got big quick, you know, always just small steps.”
Terri Brunner, with Joel's Greenhouse, pots perennial hibiscus flowers Friday, April 30, 2021, at the greenhouse near Pine Island. Joel's Greenhouse is celebrating its 50th year in business this year. (Joe Ahlquist / jahlquist@postbulletin.com)
The greenhouse eventually grew to the point where it was time for Flemke to take his first big risk with the business.
For the first 20 years after starting Joel's Greenhouse, Flemke ran it while also farming and running a dairy farm. By 1990, Flemke and his wife, Nancy, made the choice to commit to the greenhouse.
“My wife and I knew that this is what we wanted to do,” Flemke said. “And so, we eventually sold the cows, … put up a new retail building and went from there.”
Flemke credits much of the business’s success to Nancy. When they got married in 1976, she became a part of the business and helped grow it. Nancy took over the books and helped keep the greenhouse up to date with current trends in terms of the type of products and the greenhouses’ design.
“She's played a big role,” Flemke said. “Nancy has helped me. We worked as a team. We've been married 45 years this month, so she's worked right alongside me all the time … We always have the new catalogs that would come in and we'd stay up late at night looking at them, and then she couldn't sleep because she was so excited about the new things that were coming down the pipeline.”
And the two have since created one of the premier greenhouses in Southeastern Minnesota.
“We sleep and breathe a greenhouse,” Flemke said.
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Fifty years later, Joel's Greenhouse still blossoming in Pine Island - PostBulletin.com
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