Despite his city background, her husband, Gerald Murphy, for whom the farming lifestyle was quite new, researched the idea and built a spacious and beautiful project.
The new Tail-ling Hills Farm Greenhouse is located west of Bienfait.
Lifestyles visited the area’s new attraction on an opening day last Saturday after the first crowd has left.
“We are really, really excited and the feedback so far has been really, really positive,” said Melissa.
The dream started coming true for the Murphy family about three years ago when they purchased and put up the frame for the greenhouse.
“When we had a little bit of money saved up, we’d added a little bit more. We officially registered our Tail-ling Hills business in Saskatchewan in December (2018) … And then started our plans and started working towards getting our greenhouse to open,” said Melissa.
The name Tail-ling Hills was chosen for a reason.
“Tail-ling Hills Farm comes from us brainstorming. Because we have our animals, so the tail part, but we also live close to the tailing hills from the coal mining, so we went with the Tail-ling Hills Farm… We actually did the maple leaf (instead of a dash in the middle) because we are Canadian owned,” said Melissa.
Both Melissa and Gerald have their full-time jobs, however, with the help of their kids, Kwade, Syena, Kiral and Sailey, they learn and do everything themselves. They grow a wide variety of vegetable plants, flowers, herbs, berries, bushes and shrubs.
“We are trying to provide high-quality products for a reasonable price, so everyone has an opportunity to enjoy gardening as much as we do,” said Melissa.
There are even little handmade plant boxes for sale to make gardening more exciting.
Looking into the future they hope to turn an old grain bin into a cozy little store on site.
If everything goes well, they hope to expand and put up the second greenhouse, thus turning what now is a hobby into a new full-time job.
“We just bought a second frame, so we are hoping to grow our business, and we are wanting to know what Estevan wants to see,” Melissa said.
They want to cater to the Estevan and area market and be able to offer the community more than they can find in a standard collection of a big retail store.
“We want to go into the specialty products, products of unique colours, unique plants.”
Already now they have a large variety of different plants, and they keep learning more and more about what's out there.
“I love all the petunias… We learned of a lot of plants once we started doing our orders this year,” said Melissa.
Most of the vegetable plants along with some flowers they grew themselves, however with other plants they came across some unforeseen complications.
“Some of the specialty products you have to buy from a propagator, because you can’t buy the seeds, so you order them from propagation companies,” said Melissa.
And that’s where they came across another challenge.
“They want you to buy so much… I think it’s 1,000 plants. So if you are a grower, and you got a big greenhouse, you buy 1,000 plants and you sell it like Walmarts and stuff it’s fine. But for a small greenhouse, it’s difficult to get in with the smaller quantities. You only need 50 of one colour. So we found one company that would sell smaller quantities,” Gerald said.
When they came from suppliers plants were really small, so the Murphy family had to provide enough heat and light for them to grow in the greenhouse. Melissa shared that for the first month Gerald slept in the greenhouse to make sure that the plants that were moved to the greenhouse in March wouldn’t freeze. And they still keep getting up every two to three hours to put wood in the stove that keeps the greenhouse at the proper temperature overnights.
The annual part of the greenhouse is slated to stay open from May until they sell out. Later in summer, they also plan to have vegetables grown in their own garden for sale.
“We are looking into different crops, so once our annual production is done in the greenhouse, we’ll open to secondary crops. So we’ll grow tomatoes, cucumbers in the actual greenhouse,” Melissa said.
The greenhouse is open to customers on weekdays from 4:30 p.m. – 9 p.m., and weekends 9 a.m. – 9 p.m., and there are also delivery options available for Estevan and the area.
