Meet Our Team  »  Jan B.

Jan B.

More About Jan

Jan’s many hats:

Jan has been part of Rush Creek Growers for more than twenty years. She is our trucking/shipping coordinator, organizing how the staff pulls orders and does the shipping paper work, so that the office can accurately invoice customers. She loads trucks and does deliveries. Jan  operates the transplanting machine, enters the transplanting data into our inventory program and keeps the transplanting line moving along. She is part of the team keeping track of hard goods and organizing the warehouse. She is also a dog wrangler, pallet pusher, construction worker and Mathematician.

Jan’s Rush Creek Growers story:

How is it possible to work someplace for 23 years and have no amusing stories to tell? Especially when you work with a whole lot of funny and wonderful people? I’m going to attribute it to the fact that there are just too many to keep track of. It’s like Gary said when I was talking to him about it, “it’s not like we don’t bust a gut every day laughing about something.” Every day we have a morning meeting, and every time we end up cracking up over someone’s story about sinkholes, or baby goats, or one of Gary’s crazy dreams. We work together transplanting or shipping or doing repair and construction, and we spend a lot of time talking and laughing, teasing each other and sharing our lives. Most of the stories I remember weren’t funny at the time but have morphed into humorous memories—like arriving at a delivery back in the days when we loaded our plants on boarded shelves and opening the truck to find an avalanche of potted herbs cascading onto the ground at the feet of our customers. Yikes. I thought I was going to cry. Fortunately, our customers are the best you could ask for, and in this case, they spent a good hour with me picking everything up and putting it back together. Then happily accepted delivery.

And of course, now that I’m writing, things are coming back to me. I don’t do many deliveries anymore, but when I am in the truck one or two of my dogs are often with me. I got pulled over at the weigh station one time, which is always a bit of an unwanted delay and hassle, and saw one of the troopers walking up to my cab window, looking very serious. I rolled down the window, she looked in and said “does that dog have a dmv medical card?” I laughed and said “no, but she’s got a rabies vaccination” as the now smiling officer handed me a dog biscuit. She directed me over to the scales because she wanted to say hi to Frieda.

Dogs, cats, hummingbirds, snakes (Mel screaming at snakes), fantastic co-workers, and so many wonderful plants, there’s always something entertaining happening at Rush Creek. It is, honestly, the best place to work, ever, anywhere.