BUSINESS SPOTLIGHT
Drive by Highway 65, where it meets Highway 134, at night, and you might crane your neck to see what is inside the old metal building that has been vacant for more than 20 years. It isn’t just the activity, but the quality of it – a kind of glow of warmth and light, greenery and string lights, clay and rattan. It beckons.
This is the new Green Acres Lake Providence which held its grand opening last Friday. It is wine store, specialty food store, and unique plant store in one. And it isn’t content to only be that. “Tell us what you want, and we’ll get it,” said co-owner Janna Kiefer.
Husband and wife Jack and Janna moved to Jack’s hometown of Lake Providence during the pandemic. They’d had a lake house here for a couple of years and had begun to think of it, over their fast-paced Baton Rouge life, as home.
But there were things to miss, of course. “I was accustomed to being able to get anything I wanted whenever I wanted. Moving here was an adjustment. To be able to get decent wine for a reasonable price, cheeses, things for a charcuterie board, I wanted to have that here,” said Janna.
“And the plants,” said Jack, “I just needed a bigger greenhouse. They were taking over our house.” Most of the plants that are for sale now, the Kiefers have propagated themselves.
Beyond providing a service to the locals, they wanted to give Lake Providence something it didn’t have, something that would attract visitors and make their time here unique. Janna imagined them saying – “what about that cute little wine shop and plant store on the highway?”
To get the building in shape required a lot. “No surface has been untouched,” said Jack. Electrical, plumbing, insulation, heat and air, and of course paint, which the Kiefers did themselves, along with their nine-year-old daughter McCall. “McCall thinks it’s her store,” said Janna. “And she has worked just as hard as we have to make it happen.” She’s stripped floors and tables, did inventory, and is growing her own lemon trees. “The first lemon trees we have to sell here will be because of McCall.”
As for six-yearold Jack Wyatt? “Less enthused,” said Jack. “He’s here for moral support, and when he has to be.”
Janna is known for being able to put together a meal from whatever is in her fridge. That’s what she wants to do for people here. “We’ll have pastas and sauces, good cheese for an appetizer, local lettuce from the Miller’s hydroponic greenhouse in Transylvania for a salad to go along with it. Grab a good bottle of wine. Next week we’ll have Sugaree cakes for dessert. You don’t have to go anywhere else,” she said.
They also have pepper jellies and crackers, Suffit’s pickles, and are adding grits and other specialty items shortly.
On Friday for their opening, Jack said, the locals “showed up and showed out. We didn’t have a second the whole day when we didn’t have a customer. It gives us peace of mind that we might have something here that they want, and that can work.” Janna called it humbling.
“It was fun to hear the different stories and perspectives on what the place used to be,” said Jack. Stories of the old Ship Ahoy and Green Acres in its first iteration, which was a restaurant and flower shop. Janna liked that the name was already familiar to people, and that it fit what they planned to do with the space.
They plan to keep evolving too. They are open to ideas and to carrying products people love. “Just tell us,” said Janna, “and we can get it here in 48 hours, mostly.” If there’s a special plant people want, the Kiefers say they will get it if they can’t grow it themselves.
In addition to what it carries now, Green Acres Lake Providence will soon have a selection of harder-to-find spirits and an expanded grocery section, including Sugaree cakes from a family bakery in New Albany, Miss., which has been featured in Garden and Gun, Southern Living, New York Times and more.
They are open Wednesday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. 7674 Hwy. 65 in Lake Providence.
