20 years immediately after Mike Hood founded 3 Seasons Landscaping with his brother, Tim, he realized it was earlier time to locate new headquarters for an at any time-expanding landscape enterprise and to comprehend his lengthy-expression system of opening a retail shop. A 2½-acre piece of the previous Callahan house, 264 Ayer Street, introduced itself in 2020 as the best resolution, he mentioned. And with Tim getting moved out of state, Mike brought an additional brother, Rob, on board to manage 3 Seasons Backyard garden Keep and the landscaping organization.
The commercially zoned residence took for a longer period to find than he’d have chosen, Mike mentioned, but trying to keep the organization in Harvard was a priority, provided his family’s ties to the city and the loyalty he reported his Harvard customers have regularly shown.
Mike Hood (still left) and Rob Hood stand in entrance of a Blackstone Candle screen at Three Seasons Garden Shop. (Photograph by Thomas Kilian)
Mike, Rob, and their four siblings all grew up on Aged Mill Highway immediately after their mom and dad moved there 47 several years ago. Their father, Bob Hood, sent the mail in town for 25 decades, and their maternal grandmother, Rita Lombardi, was celebrated at the 2018 City Assembly as the town’s oldest resident. She died at household in 2021 at the age of 102.
Looking again and reflecting on her sons’ achievements, Peggy Hood advised the Press she wasn’t astonished when her outside-loving sons Mike and Tim took up landscaping as a career. All through their youth, she’d line up outside assignments for them at their Grandfather Lombardi’s spot in Clinton. He was an engineer by occupation, but in retirement targeted on meticulous lawn and stone get the job done. “He was exacting and taught them a ton,” she claimed. To this working day, she reported, “Mike prefers to be out and about.”
Rob, also, is well suited to his existing job in the Three Seasons business, controlling the workplace and inventory at the keep and creating up proposals for landscaping customers. He “always preferred books and is extremely clever … they are a very good match for the enterprise,” Peggy mentioned.
The retail enterprise started with the sale of mums on the store’s garden in 2020, though the store itself opened in the spring of 2021—after the previous storage building had been renovated. It was paneled in knotty pine milled at a Hubbardston lumber mill, and the partitions were being adorned with antique farm implements that the Hoods discovered in an old barn on the residence. Among 2021 and 2022, stock at the shop steadily enhanced. Currently, the shop carries backyard tools of all varieties flower pots grass seed, backyard garden soil, and soil amendments and gift objects, which include Blackstone candles and diminutive, handmade reward bags. Seasonal things these as bushes and flowering crops mulch, pumpkins, and hay bales and Xmas trees, wreaths, and arrangements make appearances throughout the months the keep is open, which are April 1 by way of Christmas.
Reflecting on the previous yr, Mike says he has experienced the most entertaining selling Xmas trees, and if he had to opt for a preferred solution, he’d go with the Jonathan Environmentally friendly grass seed, which he swears by. The opening future 12 months of a further backyard garden middle on Ayer Road—just as the retailer gains steam—has the two Rob and Mike established to retain improving 3 Seasons. Up coming year, for instance, Mike designs to develop the inventory to include wild chook supplies, perennials, seeds, organic double-ground mulch, stone, and substantial-conclusion outside hearth units from Montana Fireplace Pits.
