Fayette Seed closes, after 83 years serving farmers and backyard gardeners

Fayette Seed on Red Mile Road closed its doors Saturday after 83 years of selling to farmers and backyard gardeners.

This small family store shifted its business model through the years as agriculture changed. Its first 40 years were strictly as a farm supply store selling seed and fertilizer.

As agricultural farms declined in Fayette County, replaced by horse farms, and home gardening boomed, Fayette Seed pivoted to become one of Central Kentucky’s premiere lawn and garden stores for vegetable and flower plants, seeds, fertilizers, hand tools and lawn care products.

“Backyard Gardening Headquarters” became its slogan.

Owner Jerry Goins next saw the home horticulture scene change. “With both spouses working, people didn’t want to spend their weekends planting a garden and taking care of the yard.

Now they hire somebody to mow the yard,” he said.

“Square-foot gardening is the craze. Twenty years ago, when we were on South Broadway, people raised big gardens. But not so much anymore,” he said. Plus, big box stores had an impact, making shopping more convenient, with extended hours at night and on weekends.

Family business

The Goins family has been part of Fayette Seed since the 1950s. Jerry’s father, Ernest, started with Fayette Seed in 1953.

Jerry, 67, has worked at the store 48 years; his wife, Karen, 67, the company bookkeeper, has been there 45 years. Jerry’s brother Wayne, 69, grew up in the business, stepping out in 2009 when he sold his interest to Jerry.

“It is so time-consuming,” Jerry said. “As we get older, we’re not as spry as we once were.”

Fayette Seed opened in 1934 in the 100 block of East Main Street; 20 years later, it moved to 137 Rose Street at the corner of Vine Street, where Christ Church Apartments are today. Ernest Goins was a World War II veteran who who received a Purple Hear. He had come straight off the farm in Garrard County.

Fayette Seed was financially rocky at the time, Jerry said. “The bottom line was a little in the red each year. Dad became a partner in 1957, and immediately the company became profitable.”

That was thanks to their Dad’s personality. “Dad could relate to the people he was dealing with because he was born and raised on a farm,” Wayne said.

Fayette Seed specialized in row-crop supplies, anything related to raising corn or tobacco, which was the major cash crop for most Kentucky farmers. Fayette Seed stocked tobacco seed, fertilizer, and insect and sucker control products. Goins extended credit to tenant farmers in the spring to buy what they needed to put in their crop.“When they sold their tobacco in November or December, they would come in and pay their bill. That went on till the late 1970s,” Jerry said.

The store had a railroad siding, and in January, train cars came from Canada loaded with peat moss. “When we opened the car, the bales were frozen to one another. We had to chunk out the ice,” Jerry said.

The brothers unloaded bales of peat moss onto a two-wheel cart, then wheeled the cart to a hand-operated elevator that held exactly 15 bales. In the basement, “We’d lay them down in stacks, three bales high, kicking rats out of the way all the time,” Wayne said.

“The first time we got a forklift, we thought we were in heaven,” he said, chuckling.

In 1968, as urban renewal led to plans to take up the railroad tracks that ran through downtown, Fayette Seed moved to 630 South Broadway. Ernest Goins’ brother, Cecil, was working at Fayette Seed by then.

“In the early 1970s is when the lawn and garden aspect of our business really started to take off,” Wayne said. By the latter part of the 1970s, agriculture was beginning to decline in Fayette County. “The whole time the farm business was going down, the lawn and garden business was going up.”

Fayette Seed never called itself a garden center “because we didn’t carry nursery stock. But for backyard gardeners and people who had truck gardens, we were their first choice,” Jerry said. During the 1980s, Fayette Seed had secondary stores on Winchester Road and Regency Road. By the early 1990s, only the Red Mile store remained.

The last of Fayette Seed’s early partners, Floyd H. Wright, died in 1985. Ernest Goins became the sole owner and made his sons equal partners. Four years later, the store moved to its present site at 731 Red Mile Road. Ernest died in 1992.

Leaving ‘a big void’

The reality of Fayette Seed closing might not hit backyard gardeners and horse farms until next spring, and not just in Fayette County.

“We’re talking tens of thousands of retail and commercial customers who come all the way from Ashland, Paintsville, Prestonsburg, Manchester, London, Somerset, Danville, Lawrenceburg, Frankfort,” Wayne said.

Fayette Seed sold to high school horticulture programs throughout Central Kentucky, the Lexington Cemetery, LFUCG, plus Morehead State University, the University of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University and Georgetown College.

Eighty percent of their plant sales are vegetable plants, starting with onion sets in early February, followed by garlic bulbs and shallots, and seed potatoes the first of March.

“It’s going to be a big void, I can tell you,” Jerry said. “People are going to have to go to more than one place to get what they bought there, if they can even find things.”

Fayette Seed packaged and sold its own line of seeds. In January, employees weighed and packaged beans, peas and corn, plus weighed and packaged several dozen small vegetable seed like kale, carrots, radishes, lettuce and spinach.

The store carried seed from large companies like Burpee Seeds for $1.99 or $2.99 a packet, Jerry said. “But I guarantee, there are more seed in our packets that we sell for 95 cents,” he said.

There will be a dispersal sale of store fixtures and office equipment at 10 a.m. Nov. 19.

Fayette Seed has two part-time and two full-time employees. “Everybody has a job lined up, so that doesn’t weigh on me,” Jerry said.

Everybody but Jerry.

“I won’t know what to do with myself,” he said, taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes. “I get teary just thinking about it.”

This story was originally published October 30, 2016 at 11:03 AM with the headline "Fayette Seed closes, after 83 years serving farmers and backyard gardeners."