History
The Lucas Greenhouse story began in the fall of 1978, when George and Louise Lucas purhased four acres of land from Louise's father and constructed a two gutter connected 30 x 150 foot greenhouse.
On April 7, 1979, Lucas Greenhouses was officially open for business. Our product line spoke for itself, excellence was always our first priority, and it paid off. After only one year, we had more demand than we had product. So up went four gutter connected greenhouses, covering 18, 432 sq. ft., to better serve our existing customers with a larger product line, increase sales and reach out to new customers.
We built a second addition of 18,432 sq. ft. in 1982 and a third addition, of the same size in 1984. Over the next five years, we made improvements to the existing facility and built a center greenhouse that enabled us to connect the entire greenhouse.
In 1990 we built our first heated floor propagation house, which was 16,704 sq. ft. and a 60 x 80 foot bulb cold storage. Our growth had taken us to the point that our home kitchen could no longer serve as an office, so in 1993 we built an 18,000 sq. ft. warehouse/office building.
In 1994 we were able to build our first fully automated, curved glass GGS 55,000 sq. ft. greenhouse. This was something we never dreamed we would see, heated floors, echo hanging basket system; boom irrigation, computer controlled environment with natural ventilation, shade cloth/ heat retention curtain, and high efficiency
In 1998 we doubled the size of the GGS glassgreenhouse adding 55,000 sq. ft. of space. Looking to increase our efficiency we added 100,000 sq. ft. in 2002, building the first open roof glass greenhouse from Nexus called Open Sky with flood floor irrigation to collect our water run off and reuse.
Fall of 2004 brought an additional 92,000 sq. ft. of Open Sky glass to help us meet the demands of our customers. Over the past 10 years, we have added several outdoor growing areas, approximately 10 acres, which allows us to harden crops to the environment, making them ready for your customers.
The standard that has always remained constant is our focus on excellence. We gear our product toward the Retail Garden Center, striving to give them the very best in both plant material and service. Trying to maintain this focus on excellence, we ship most of our product ourselves with 3 temperature controlled trailers and 11 - 26 foot straight trucks. Our product is cart loaded, to eliminate damage due to handling and can be rolled directly to the sale location.
Our operation could not operate without the hard work and dedication of many key people from growers, to watering crew, planters, order pullers, warehouse management, construction crew, maintenance workers, drivers and office staff. Each person has an important and intricate part in what makes our TEAM here at Lucas Greenhouses, and we are thankful for each one.