The Family Farm Growing More Than Plants

Jonathan Breeden: [00:00:00] On this week’s episode of The Best of Johnston County Podcast, our guest is Chris Smith, one of the operators of Smith Nursery on Sanders Road in the McGee’s Crossroads Area.

We talked to Chris about his time growing up in Johnston County, the different services that Smith Nursery provides, from wholesale to retail, to ice cream, to field trips, and where he sees Smith Nursery going in the future, and how you and your family can enjoy this beautiful farm. So listen in.

Welcome to another episode of Best of Johnston County, brought to you by Breeden Law Office. Our host, Jonathan Breeden, an experienced family lawyer with a deep connection to the community, is ready to take you on a journey through the area that he has called home for over 20 years. Whether it’s a deep dive into the love locals have for the county or unraveling the complexities of family law, Best of Johnston County presents an authentic slice of this unique community.

Jonathan Breeden: Hello, and welcome to another edition of The Best of [00:01:00] Johnston County Podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Breeden, and on today’s episode, we have Chris Smith, one of the operators of Smith Nursery right here in Johnston County.

One of my favorite places to go. I love the pumpkins and the ice cream and the goat. Anyway, we’re gonna talk to him a little bit about what they’re doing there at Smith Nursery. They are completely back from the fire at Father’s Day of 2024. They’ve expanded their retail operations, and we’re gonna talk a little bit about that, the different things that they grow, the different things that they do, and why he loves Johnston County as much as I do.

So but before we get to that, we’d like to ask you to like, follow, and subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re seeing it, whether it be on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, X, TikTok, Instagram, or any of the other social media channels of the Best of Johnston County podcast. The Best of Johnston County podcast comes out every single Monday and has now for over two and a half years.

So go back and listen to some of the previous episodes. We’ve had the vast majority of the county commissioners. We’ve had now Congressman Brad Knott. We had [00:02:00] Woody Bailey talk about IT services, Tim Sims, dentistry. We had Just Dog People. We had Michael Soler just a few weeks ago talk about how to train your dog, Blue Line, K9.

If you love Johnston County as much as I do, this is the podcast for you. Welcome, Chris.

Chris Smith: Thank you.

Jonathan Breeden: I didn’t call you the owner.

Chris Smith: No.

Jonathan Breeden: You, you said, “Don’t do that”- No … ’cause your, your dad and brother

Chris Smith: I would get in trouble.

Jonathan Breeden: I didn’t call you the owner.

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: I said you’re one of the operators.

Chris Smith: That’s right. That’s fair. That’s fair.

Jonathan Breeden: You don’t even have a title. You just do whatever needs to be done.

Chris Smith: That’s pretty much true, but yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: All right. Well, tell the audience who you are and what you do.

Chris Smith: Well, my name is Chris Smith. And I work at Smith Nursery. That’s my family’s business. My, my dad started the nursery in 1980, and I grew up in Johnston County.

Been here all my life. And at the nursery, we grow woody ornamental plants that’d be like your shrubs, bushes, you know, stuff like that for your landscape, and we grow strawberries, blueberries, greenhouse tomatoes greenhouse cucumbers, and we do [00:03:00] agritourism. We work with school groups and stuff like that, so a little bit of everything we have.

Jonathan Breeden: No, it’s a lot. It’s a lot. Well, let’s start with the wholesale side because, I mean, I guess that’s where it started.

Chris Smith: Sure.

Jonathan Breeden: And so, so you sell to can I just show up and buy a shrub, or do I have to be a, a professional landscaper?

Chris Smith: Well, in the wholesale to get wholesale benefits, you have to be a landscaper or another

Jonathan Breeden: Okay

Chris Smith: nursery or a garden center. So-

Jonathan Breeden: Okay …

Chris Smith: you know, we’ll sell to other nurseries like ourselves, and maybe they’re gonna take that plant that we grow and shift it up into a larger pot, you know, and grow it out. Or maybe they’re gonna re-wholesale, re-wholesale it or

Jonathan Breeden: Okay

Chris Smith: retail it themselves or something. We’ll sell it to garden centers and all across, you know, Raleigh, Durham, different places like that.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay

Chris Smith: and we’ll sell to landscapers. They’re gonna

Jonathan Breeden: Right

Chris Smith: install it either at someone’s house or into commercial jobs.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. But I can go there and just buy a single shrub or two for my house as

Chris Smith: well?

Yeah, absolutely. That would be on the retail side. That’s on the retail side. So we, we kinda have both things going on. Okay. So at the [00:04:00] retail side, what most people would know us as, when you come to the storefront there, what we brand as Smith’s Farm Market we have a selection of shrubs and plants, and we buy in some things that we don’t grow, hanging baskets and annuals and things like that.

So anyone can walk up and

Jonathan Breeden: Okay

Chris Smith: buy whatever plants we have in stock.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. And so where is the nursery and the business?

Chris Smith: We’re McGee’s Crossroads. I mean, the thing about being from the Cleveland community is you don’t. It’s hard to say where you.

Jonathan Breeden: You know, I understand that. I understand that.

Chris Smith: We don’t have a township or anything, but.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. I know where it is, but with people listening, right?

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: So what’s the address?

Chris Smith: The address is 443 Sanders Road, and that’s, you know, we’re about two miles away from West Johnston High School.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah. So that’s cool. So, all right. So how many acres is the farm? I’ve always wondered.

Chris Smith: All together, so my grandfather bought the farm in 1953, and it might maybe 40-ish acres, something like that. But, you know, some of that is wooded and stuff. It’s not all in production, so.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Chris Smith: I think nursery production, we [00:05:00] have a little over 12 acres of nursery production. We have 3 acres of strawberries probably 2 acres of blueberries, and then we have greenhouses and stuff like that across other.

Jonathan Breeden: All right. So you’re not growing somewhere else. It’s all grown.

Chris Smith: It’s all right there.

Jonathan Breeden: Right there at that one location.

Chris Smith: Yep.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay. Cool, cool. All right. So when and who got the idea to get into agritourism?

Chris Smith: Well, so what’s been told to me, so I was younger, so I wasn’t a part of the business as much back then, obviously. I… But we started growing strawberries in 1994, ’95. And I was born in ’84, so my brother, who’s seven years younger than me, when he was in 1st grade I think his first grade teacher asked my parents if they could bring the kids out to the farm and pick strawberries and kinda hear about how strawberries are grown and all that kinda stuff.

And, so they agreed to it, they came out, they did it. Everybody had a good time, I guess, and then they realized that there was a demand for this. And other teachers maybe reached out, heard that what happened and, “Could we come?” And stuff like that. [00:06:00] So that would’ve probably been 1998, sometime, oh around there. So that’s when we started, and the idea was born from my brother’s 1st grade class.

Jonathan Breeden: Oh, how about that? So sort of accidental farm tourism.

Chris Smith: Yeah. That’s kinda how it started. Yeah. And then we realized that there was, there was something to it.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. And so now I know my kids when they were young at Cleveland Elementary went to your farm and did the tour, whatever. How many field trips are y’all doing every year now? Do you have any idea?

Chris Smith: That’d be a question for my wife there. Okay. Well, so I don’t know how to answer that exactly. But in April and May, during strawberry season, today is April 10th we had our first field trip today, and we’ll have ’em pretty much every day until about mid-May.

Jonathan Breeden: Oh my goodness. So 30 or 40?

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah.

Chris Smith: And so then a lot of times there’ll be multiple in a day.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Chris Smith: Like, there’ll be multiple schools come the same day.

Jonathan Breeden: Oh, that’s awesome.

Chris Smith: And then in the fall also, September and October, we do field trips with hay rides, and everybody gets a pumpkin and stuff like that. So,

Jonathan Breeden: Y’all charge for that?

Chris Smith: We’re talking [00:07:00] 150 classes.

Jonathan Breeden: 150 classes. Yeah. Golly, that’s wild.

Chris Smith: So.

Jonathan Breeden: Y’all charge for these field trips?

Chris Smith: Yeah. So there’s a charge per student. In the spring, they come, they get to pick a quart of strawberries. They get to feed the animals. A staff member will lead ’em around. They talk to ’em about the farm. They talk to ’em about the strawberry life cycle. They have a station, they have different stations. One station they talk about honeybees and their role in pollination, and everything that goes on inside of a beehive, and they let ’em look inside of a hive that’s not active or anything.

There’s no bees in it, but they let ’em see what it’s like. They let ’em taste honey. They go see the chickens and the animals and get to feed them. And it’s there’s a charge per kid, but all that’s included in the charge.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Chris Smith: And then the parents can come along, no charge.

Jonathan Breeden: Oh, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, that’s great that y’all do that. What other, I mean, I know it’s strawberry season is sort of mid-April to June 1st, and you have pick your own strawberries, right?

Chris Smith: That’s right. Yeah. Which that’s pretty much true. We say it’s you know, about April 10th or so is what we advertise most of the time is about when it starts. This year [00:08:00] we started picking at the end of March. Seems like every year it’s a little bit earlier and earlier, so but that goes from say 1st of April till 1st of June. And we have pick your own blueberries that starts maybe second week of May and goes through the end of July. And then in the fall we do hayrides and pumpkins, and that’s kinda like a mid-September till Halloween.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay. Well, cool. Right. And I’ve done the hayride and the pumpkins and all that stuff when my kids were were smaller, so that, that’s a ton of fun. And so you also have a store. What do you sell in the store?

Chris Smith: At the store, so in addition to like our garden center plants and strawberries and produce, I guess I should add with the produce, we grow greenhouse tomatoes. So this year, this time of year, you know, a lot of people love a fresh tomato, you know, in the summer, and you can’t get a fresh tomato in April or May, you know, it’s too early. So we, we plant ’em back in November, and by end of February we’re picking tomatoes.

So you can come to our store and buy fresh tomatoes, homegrown tomatoes, cucumbers, salad mix, basil, all [00:09:00] that that we grow on the farm. And then we buy local produce that we don’t grow, squash, zucchini, corn, stuff that we’re not growing we’ll find from other local farmers and offer it there. We offer fresh-baked breads milk, eggs. We have chickens on our farm. Honey, jams and jelly. All kinds of stuff like that. And then we’ve recently opened our own bakery, so we bake our banana breads, pound cakes, all kinds of sweets and cookies and stuff that’s, that is really good.

Jonathan Breeden: Well, now I’m hungry. So where do you do the baking?

Chris Smith: Right there on the farm. And our barn that burned down a couple years ago, when we rebuilt it, we actually put in a commercial kitchen in the barn. So s- probably last October or so is when we started baking out of there. And like I said, it was the breads and then they’ve e- even do stuff like chicken pot pies, chicken pastry, all that kind of stuff right there on the property.

Jonathan Breeden: That sounds good.

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: That sounds good. I know you have honey.

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: I bought

Chris Smith: Yeah

Jonathan Breeden: … I bought honey there before.

Chris Smith: That’s right.

Jonathan Breeden: And you have your own beehives. [00:10:00]

Chris Smith: We have our own hives. Me and my wife used to help take care, do the hives kinda ourselves some, and I got stung and had a bad reaction to ’em, so we no longer do that

But there’s a, a man named Ron Lassiter that’s a native Johnston County guy and, and he comes and he keeps bees all over the county. But he helps manage our hives and has some of his own hives there. But there’s probably a total of 15 or 16 beehives on our property, and they help pollinate our blueberries and strawberries and other crops. And then the benefit is we get honey from our own property.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah. Well, let’s talk some about the animals, because some of the animals that I remember when I was there seven or eight years ago are still there. The goat, I think his name is Bandit.

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: He’s still there?

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: How old is that goat?

Chris Smith: I don’t know. He might be 15 years old, something like that. Yeah. He’s been around.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. Why is he always on top? Is it goats need to be up high ’cause I’ve never been there and him not been on top of whatever containers that he’s got there.

Chris Smith: Yeah. I mean, I’m not an animal expert, but.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Chris Smith: But goats [00:11:00] like to climb, and we’ve built like a bridge, a little makeshift swinging bridge, and they’ll climb that bridge and cross it and they like to climb.

They like. I don’t know why, but.

Jonathan Breeden: I got you. I got you. Well, and there’s some pigs.

Chris Smith: Yeah. We have three pigs. We all together we probably have three pigs, maybe four goats, two sheep, a donkey, maybe 30 chickens, and a cow.

Jonathan Breeden: A cow. Yeah. There used to be a horse.

Chris Smith: There used to be a horse.

Jonathan Breeden: But you told me when we sat down before we started taping, the horse is no longer there.

Chris Smith: It’s no longer with us, but yeah, we had a. She lived probably to be 22-ish, something like that.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay. I got you.

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: So why did you choose not to replace the horse?

Chris Smith: Well, we just hadn’t yet, but that’s not a definitive thing.

Jonathan Breeden: I got you, buddy.

Chris Smith: It might happen in the future, but just hadn’t yet.

Jonathan Breeden: I got you. I got you.

Have family law questions? Need guidance to navigate legal challenges? The compassionate team at Breeden Law Office is here to help. Visit us at www. breedenfirm. com for practical advice, resources, or to book a [00:12:00] consultation. Remember, when life gets messy, you don’t have to face it alone.

Jonathan Breeden: Well, tell me a little bit about and I asked you this before we sat down so I’m gonna ask you this on the thing. If I have a child or kids, do I have to buy a ticket to go see the animals or pet the goats or whatever? Like, can I just go out there while it’s open, 9:00 to 5:00, 9:00 to 6:00, Monday through Saturday, and just go see the animals?

Chris Smith: Yeah. You can, there’s no ticket or anything like that.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Chris Smith: We don’t charge a entry fee into our farm, so you.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Chris Smith: You can come in, you can check in at the store. We offer animal feed for a dollar a bag, so, but there’s no charge to go just check out animals and see them. If you wanna feed them, you can get a bag of feed for a dollar, walk down there and check them out, and that’s during business hours is the deal.

Jonathan Breeden: Right. Okay. Well, that’s cool. That’s cool. I mean, I didn’t know that, ’cause I mean.

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: There’s no charge to just go see the animals, and you can do pick your own strawberries.

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: In the spring, pick your own blueberries in the summer, pick your own pumpkin in the fall.

Chris Smith: That’s right.

Jonathan Breeden: Also in the fall you do, like, a [00:13:00] fall. It’s almost like a big festival. You got some games going on. You got hayrides. Talk a little bit about that.

Chris Smith: Well, we always do, like a kickoff to the fall like a fall open house, you know?

Jonathan Breeden: Right.

Chris Smith: And so we’ll offer things that we’re making in our bakery, you know, for samples and stuff like that. We might have a couple vendors out there. We do hayrides. But all fall long on the weekends, not just, like, a opening time or anything, we offer hayrides to the public. So, you know, in addition to, like, school groups coming out and doing hayrides during the week, on the weekends anybody, you and your family or you by yourself if you wanted to, could come out there and take hay rides, take you around the farm, drop you off at the animals and the pumpkin patch, and do all that, and they’ll pick you back up and take you back to the store.

Jonathan Breeden: It was fun. I did that. I hate that I was telling you earlier that my kids, they got too old, and now I need to find some otherbo- put somebody else’s kids. So I can go out there and feed the goat and take your hay ride and,

Chris Smith: You can do it by yourself

Jonathan Breeden: pick, pick a pumpkin

Chris Smith: Don’t be ashamed.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah, I, I, I probably should. I probably should do that myself, even [00:14:00] though my kids are too old for that now, because I looked forward to that every single year, and we probably did it three or four years in a row. And then they just got too old, and they’re too cool for it now. I think you said your son’s now too co- cool for it too.

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: So, it

Chris Smith: I have a 13-year-old and a 7-year-old, and my 13-year-old is, is a little too cool for school sometimes.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah Right, too cool for school. I understand that. But one of the things that I did not know, and we can talk about this, y’all are open, it’s pretty much year-round now. You know, it used to, you know, it’d shut down about Halloween, and then it would reopen in the beginning of March, but now you’re open all the way through the winter.

Chris Smith: Yeah. We really only take off about three weeks right around Christmas and the New Year. It’s still seasonal as far as, like, how busy we are. But as population’s growing in this area, there’s been enough business to stay open pretty close to year-round. And, you know, other times of year when we don’t have strawberries or blueberries or pumpkins, we still have produce if we’re not growing it, we’re buying it from somewhere local, and we still offer milk and [00:15:00] breads and eggs and things like that for people, and houseplants and stuff. That’s kind of a year-round deal and we have a ice cream and a coffee shop that you can come to anytime.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah. The ice cream. Golly, I used to really like the ice cream. Is that homemade? What kind of ice cream is it?

Chris Smith: We make our own ice cream. So we maybe when you used to come, it. We used to get it from Mapleview Dairy.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah.

Chris Smith: A dairy out in Hillsborough. But now we make our own ice cream there. We have, It’s all soft serve ice cream now. But, like, we’ll use our own strawberries and puree ’em and make our own strawberry ice cream.

It’s probably our most popular one. We’ll make blueberry ice cream, blackberry ice cream. We try to use fresh fruits either that we’re growing or that we can buy local, and even banana ice cream. All kinds of different flavors that we switch up.

Jonathan Breeden: Now I’m getting really hungry. So that’s great. That’s great. No, I remember eating the ice cream and buying the honey when I was there the, you know, the times I went. So what’s the plan for the future? I know you’ve got the yeah, you built the brand-new building after the fire two years ago. I mean, what’s gonna happen next with Smith Nursery?

Chris Smith: Well, we talk about that kind of stuff a [00:16:00] lot and we have a lot of ideas, but it feels like every season we’ve kinda added something. Our newest thing, you know, is this bakery that we’re working on, and I think right now we need to kinda master what we’re doing. We got a lot going on and we need to kinda be a master of what we’re doing right now.

Jonathan Breeden: Well, you and the health department are becoming friends if you’ve got a commercial kitchen.

Chris Smith: Yeah. That’s- … that’s my wife’s deal with the health department. Stay clear of that kind of stuff.

Jonathan Breeden: No, I understand that.

Chris Smith: Yeah.

Jonathan Breeden: So keep doing what you’re doing. But this fall there’s gonna be pumpkins, there’s gonna be hayrides.

Chris Smith: Sure.

Jonathan Breeden: And I don’t know, they used to have cornhole out there. Y’all still have those?

Chris Smith: We got cornhole boards.

Jonathan Breeden: I mean, yeah.

Chris Smith: Out there for people to play.

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah. There’s Throw shucks or something. I remember doing some of that.

Chris Smith: Yeah. There’s cornhole, and we got, like, swing sets and stuff for kids to play around on, and it’s a great place for families to come ’cause there’s a lot of, you know, your kids can run kinda wild out in the open. And swing set, slides, they got the cornhole boards, take a hayride, see the animals. Kids enjoy, I think. We’re kind of, geared towards families, I’d say, and.

Jonathan Breeden: Right.

Chris Smith: And young children. I mean, anybody’s welcome to [00:17:00] come, but that tends to be the crowd that we draw the most. And also in the off seasons, you know, during strawberry season and during the fall, we’re pretty busy. During the other times of years, we’re trying to find a way reasons for people to come see us.

So we’ll offer workshops and stuff, maybe do, like, a mixed container workshop where we’ll help you build your own, like, hanging basket or a kind of mixed container pot that you can have at your house or we’ve done. Yeah, cookie decorating classes where they’ll make a sugar cookie and they’ll, you know. I don’t know what you call that. Royal Icing.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay. Well, that’s cool.

Chris Smith: A lot of different things like that, that go on during other times of the year to try to engage with the community. We do a free story time every Thursday where a lot of moms will bring their kids out to us, and we’ll read a story to the kids, then they’ll do some kinda activity that goes along with the story.

Jonathan Breeden: What time is that?

Chris Smith: That’s usually at 11:00 o’clock, but it does change.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay.

Chris Smith: Throughout the year

Jonathan Breeden: All right

Chris Smith: kinda depending on the weather. You know, sometimes if it’s too hot, we’ll try to do it earlier in the morning. [00:18:00] When it turns cool, we’ll try to have it later in the afternoon.

Jonathan Breeden: Okay. So-

Chris Smith: But you can check our Facebook page for events.

Jonathan Breeden: Facebook page. Yeah. All right. Yeah, ’cause you’ve got a website. So where’s the best way to find out about, you know, what’s in season, the classes, everything that’s going on?

Chris Smith: Yeah. Any of those… Our website is SmithsNurseryINC, I-N-C, .com. And on the website, my wife updates that all the time, and that will have an event calendar.

You can even, like, click a shop button on there and see what from the bakery you might be offered right now. You, sometimes we offer pre-ordered chicken pastry or, or Brunswick stew or something like that, that you can shop like that. Those event classes, like I talked about, will be listed there, things coming up.

You can go to our Facebook page, Instagram. Those are updated every day with different things that we put out.

Jonathan Breeden: I gotcha. I gotcha. So what would be your best piece of advice when it comes, ’cause you’re in the wholesale nursery business, for people with their shrubs? What are, what are some of the best shrubs for this area, and what is the number one mistake

Chris Smith: Mm

Jonathan Breeden: homeowners that don’t know anything [00:19:00] about growing shrubs, like me, make?

Chris Smith: That’s a loaded question. Probably one of the bigger mistakes is planning at the wrong time of year. You know, you wanna… Best time to plant, really, is the fall. Fall and spring. The, when you plant in the middle of summer, it’s just tough conditions for a plant.

When it’s 95 degrees outside and, and we don’t get rain for periods of time, that’s hard for a plant to adjust, and that’s probably the number one thing that I see on someone purchases a plant, doesn’t do well, and are frustrated by it. It’s probably when it was planted. The best time to plant would be early spring and fall.

As far as what plants do well here, there’s a wide variety of plants that would do well here. We, we have a good growing climate for plants. But obviously natives, if something comes here naturally, then it’s- Right … gonna do well here in your soil types and in our climate.

Jonathan Breeden: All right. Well, cool, cool. Well, the last question we ask everybody is, what do you love most about Johnston County?

Chris Smith: Oh, man. Well, this is home. This is where I’m from, and the food’s great, and [00:20:00] barbecue. But the people. I mean, this is my family and friends are all here, so

Jonathan Breeden: Yeah, it’s the people. Most everybody

Chris Smith: Yeah

Jonathan Breeden: that says, we’ve done well over 100 episodes, and 98% of the people that’s when I ask that question say

Chris Smith: Yeah

Jonathan Breeden: it’s the people. That’s what I think. That’s what Chris Smith thinks. And we’d like to thank Chris Smith from Smith Nursery on Sanders Road, just down from West Johnston High School in McGee’s Crossroads, for being our guest on this week’s episode of the Best of Johnston County podcast.

As we mentioned earlier, please like, follow, and subscribe this podcast. Give us a five-star review down below. Tag us in your Instagram stories, Best of Johnston County. Till next time, I’m your host, Jonathan Breeden.

That’s the end of today’s episode of Best of Johnston County, a show brought to you by the trusted team at Breeden Law Office. We thank you for joining us today and we look forward to sharing more interesting facets of this community next week. Every story, every viewpoint adds another thread to the rich tapestry of Johnston County.

If the legal aspects highlighted [00:21:00] raised some questions, help is just around the corner at www. breedenfirm. com.