The nursery and greenhouse line

1949 — 2022

The one specialty that never left: Every other specialty in this record — wheat, cream, orchard fruit, even mint at its 1949 size — contracted. The county's trade in living plants did not. The 1954 census enumerated it as its own county table: nursery and greenhouse products, flower and vegetable seeds and plants, flowers and bulbs sold from St. Joseph County farms for $551,972 in 1954, up from $407,811 in 1949 — over half a million contemporary dollars out of glasshouses and nursery rows at the city's edge. Within it, nursery products proper — trees, shrubs, vines, ornamentals — were sold by 30 farms off 186 acres for $189,265 in 1954, the acreage nearly doubled from 90 in 1949, with cut flowers and florist stock grown under glass and in the open beside them. The buyers were the same suburbs that were taking the truck farms: a county landscaping itself as fast as it paved its fields bought its trees and shrubs from the farms at its own edge. The line runs unbroken to the present count. In 2022 the county's nursery, greenhouse, floriculture and sod sales stood at $6,057,000 — the third-largest crop line in the county after grains and oilseeds and other crops and hay — and ranked fourth among the eighty-eight Indiana counties reporting such sales. It is the smallest of this record's major lines and the only one whose rank, like its acreage, the suburban century improved.

Sources:

1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1954 Census of Agriculture, Vol. I, Part 4 (Indiana), County Table 8 — nursery and greenhouse products, flower and vegetable seeds and plants, flowers, and bulbs sold ($551,972 in 1954; $407,811 in 1949), and nursery products by farms, acres, and dollars, read from the printed table.
2. USDA, NASS, 2022 Census of Agriculture County Profile: St. Joseph County, Indiana — nursery, greenhouse, floriculture and sod sales of $6,057,000, ranked fourth in the state among counties reporting.