By Jondi Gumz
Don Dillon Jr. switched banks three years ago, and he’s glad he did.
He works with his son and daughter at Four Winds Growers, a wholesale nursery business his grandfather founded in 1948.
The business moved from Fremont to Corralitos 11 years ago, taking over greenhouses where a variety of trees are nurtured — orange, lemon, fig, pomegranate, avocado, olive, kumquat — for sale to retail nurseries.
“We grow things you can eat,” he said. “When all this happened, it was unnerving.”
By all this, he means the COVID-19 outbreak and the shelter in place order that told people to stay home and shuttered non-essential businesses.
Four Winds Growers, which has 26 employees, fell into the non-essential category, and so did its customers, retail nurseries across the state and nation.
“We did lay a few people off,” Dillon said. “We were uncertain what would happen.”
Lexa Dillon, one of the owners of Four Winds Growers, is packing citrus, olive and fig trees for mail order shipping.
Then along came the CARES Act, approved by Congress, signed into law by President Trump, authorizing the Paycheck Protection Program, forgivable loans if the money was used to pay employees for eight weeks.
Working with Santa Cruz County Bank, Dillon was able to get funding to bring his workforce back up to full strength.
“The process was little bit crazy,” he said, recalling the SBA website crashing. “Once you worked our way through it, it made sense.
Four Winds Growers was fortunate to have a new website — developed by Sleepless Media of Capitola — with beautiful illustrations and a functional shopping cart for retail nurseries to place and order and pay online.
“Now retail nurseries can reopen,” Dillon said. “Orders are coming in pretty strong.”