Sunlight filtered into a greenhouse at Echter’s Nursery and Garden Center on a February morning. The air was chilly outside, but inside dozens of tiny geraniums were already poking out of their trays, waiting for a drink of water from workers roving the aisles with sprayers.
It was the early stages of the company’s three-month sprint to spring. “We grow almost all of our annuals here on site, and we do about 80 percent of our business in three months,” explained Julie Echter, a third-generation member of the center’s founding family. “We go from about 30 employees to over a hundred in our peak season. So we have to hire a lot of people in a short amount of time, and train them.”
Making that happen has been especially hard with the state’s scorching-hot labor market since the pandemic. So this season, Julie Echter is trying a new tactic: She’s hiring new immigrants.
“We all of a sudden have all these people in Denver that really want to work, and it just seemed like a really obvious connection,” Echter said. And on this day, after weeks of planning, that connection was finally happening.
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