You might say Tim Cahill has a green thumb. Not long after he learned to walk, you could find him helping his dad, Dan, plant marigolds, tomatoes and other plants that the family sold from their farm near Montauk. Tim Cahill’s love for all things green and colorful – some of them mighty tasty – has never faded.
Cahill turned his first love into a career and now has 15 greenhouses that serve 30 wholesale customers. He also sells an average of 20,000 pounds of tomatoes, plus a variety of other vegetables, from his really large garden that sits in a low spot along Highway 32 just west of Salem, a stone’s throw from his greenhouses just up the hill.
Cahill Family Greenhouses has a truly unique way to sell vegetables from the stand located on the property. Every week for two decades they have filled the stand with not only tomatoes, but squash, cucumbers and all the fresh produce customers have come to expect since Tim started selling them as a teenager. Sales are by the honor system, as normally no one is there to make a sale. There is a scale and a jar on a counter in the stand. You weigh your vegetables, add up your bill, then put cash in the jar. Apparently, people who like fresh vegetables are honest, because for the most part the process has worked well.
It’s perhaps the thing Tim – and certainly his local fresh produce customers – will miss most about Cahill Family Greenhouses. Tim Cahill is moving the operation, greenhouses and all, to a location in Phelps County between Rolla and St. James. It is about halfway between Salem and St. James, a few miles west of Highway 68. He is giving up the vegetable business in the process.
The decision to move wasn’t easy. Neither was giving up the garden. Dent County has been the only home Tim, 43, and his seven children have known. Wife Becky has been here since she and Tim married. Tim himself built the home that sits on a hill above the business. Toss in the fact that Tim is one of 14 Cahill kids born to the late Dan and Carol Cahill, and it’s easy to see that family roots run deep here for the Cahills.
Dan died in 2009, Carol in 2014. They were well known in Salem and Dent County, which comes with the territory when you have 14 kids and over 50 (who’s counting?) grandkids. All of the kids – Mary, Eileen, Christine, Laura, Dan, Bridget, Tim, Elizabeth, Brian, Angela, Nick, Megan, Steven and Barry – attended Green Forest R-II and Salem High School. There was a Cahill in a Salem school for most of four decades.
Why the move?
There are a lot of reasons why Tim and Becky Cahill are packing up belongings and greenhouses and moving all of it 20 miles up the road, but the biggest seven reasons are their children, Xavier, David, James, Bernadette, Veronica, Timothy and Phillip.
All but Xavier, who attends Rolla High School, attend St. Patrick School in Rolla. Becky loads up the kids and the backpacks every morning and drives them to school, then drives back to pick them up in the afternoon. That’s about 100 miles a day, 600 a week.
“That’s part of the reason, but it’s more than that,” says Tim of the move. “Even up to about a year and a half ago, we had thought about moving, because the lay of the land here is not good for what we do. We have greenhouses up on the hill. Parking is not good. I need to expand the greenhouses, but where do I do it?
“Another factor is I love the woods. I grew up in the woods. I go hunting and my kids love to go hunting. Now we have to drive 30 minutes (to their Phelps County property) to go and 30 minutes back, and a lot of times I just can’t take them. I want them to have the opportunity like I did, to walk out the back door and hunt. It’s a dream come true.”
Becky’s uncle passed away in 2013, and her cousins decided to begin selling the family property. Ironically, Tim used to trap for Becky’s Uncle Dave on the 197 acres and did so for 10 years before he ever met Becky.
“It was a dream for us to be able to buy land, and we love that property,” Tim said. “So, when the opportunity came to buy it, it was ‘Holy Cow, this is a dream come true.’ Since then when we have time we go over there. On Sundays, we go over there and have a picnic, and the kids play in a dry creek bed.”
Still, there was a draw to stay in Salem, family roots to think about.
“I have been seriously thinking about this move for about a year and a half,” says Tim. “In that time probably not a day went by that I didn’t analyze it in some way. Ever so often I will pray and say, ‘God, please guide me, show me if it’s right. Help me if it’s not supposed to happen.’ Everything has just kept on falling into place. You know in your gut when it’s right.”
So, off they go. There is a lot that goes into the move. Land to clear for a new home and greenhouses. A new house to build. A new shop building to construct. Fifteen greenhouses to disassemble and reassemble.
“If you had told me two years ago I was going to move all these greenhouses, I would have told you you were crazy,” Tim said.
“The first day I had the dozer over there I thought, what am I doing? Then I thought today is not the end of the world. If we push down a bunch of trees and it doesn’t happen, then so be it.”
It’s happening. Tim and Becky and their seven kids plan to make the move this fall. And when spring rolls around next year, deliveries will come out of their new facility and people will still be able to flock to the greenhouses, walk through the thousands of plants, and pick just the right one for Mother’s Day. But they won’t find any turnips or cucumbers.
Giving up the garden
Dan Cahill moved to Dent County and worked construction in the early 1970s. Soon after, he starting growing plants and a family. He had more than twice as many kids as greenhouses, but that was okay with Dan and his wife Carol.
Dan was seriously injured on the job in 1978, when Tim was 4, and was never able to work construction fulltime again. Dan had to make a living and provide for his ever-growing family and had always dabbled in growing vegetables and woodcarving. He took a class on gardening and was a natural at carving. He got really good at both.
It all started with a 20x30 greenhouse on their property near Montauk, even before Dan was injured. While some of the kids moaned and groaned about helping in the dirt, Tim exhibited his green thumb early.
“I loved it,” he said of those early days. “I couldn’t wait to be down there planting. I couldn’t understand why anybody else hated to go down there planting. Even now a smell will hit me and bring me right back to when I was a kid. Every now and then, even when you are busier than heck here, you smell marigolds and it brings you right back to being a kid.”
It’s a lot different now, though. The greenhouse business is “very time crunched,” according to Tim. The season comes down to six weeks out of the year. Everything has to be planted and grown and ready to deliver because people only buy plants a few weeks out of the year.
The work goes on year-round. In the winter you start plants in the greenhouses, and those are wood heated, so there is wood to cut and stack and furnaces in 15 greenhouses to feed. Then you sell, then you regroup and do it all over again.
“You are working all day, seven days a week in the spring,” he adds. “You are always at work.”
The wholesale part of their business is 95 percent of their sales, with the other five percent made up of customers who drop by the greenhouses for spring flowers, then the vegetable stand for produce.
The produce is where Tim Cahill got his start 24 years ago, and he has been growing it ever since. He’s giving up the garden out of necessity, though it’s hard to do.
“That’s what is lacking a lot of places now, fresh, good vegetables,” he says. “That’s what will bother me. I really don’t have time to do it anymore, but I still did it. I have been doing that since I was about 16, on my own, when Dad gave it up and worked the greenhouses. The biggest thing the local people will miss is the vegetables. I will miss it, too.”
Tim Cahill pauses a minute, looks around the shop as thunder rolls in the background and rain pelts the dormant field that for the past 20 years has grown big red tomatoes and prickly okra. Among all the plants, rakes and fertilizer in the shop where he sits are bikes, a baseball glove and assorted toys. You won’t find a TV or videogames. The scene says a lot about the Cahill clan and what’s important to them.
His attention turned back to the plusses of moving. He says the family is going 20 miles north for easier hunting access, opportunity for greenhouse expansion and modernization and a shorter drive to school, but in the process, leaving behind nearly a half century of Cahill influence on Dent County, and vice versa.
“I tell people I am only moving 20 miles up the road,” he says, pointing north. “Exactly 20 miles from my place here to the gate at our new place. A lot of people come here maybe twice in the spring to buy plants. It’s not like we’re leaving the state. You still have access to us. . . The kids. They are excited. They have expressed some sadness leaving the only home they’ve ever known, a house I built myself.”
Tim doesn’t make too much out of the fact that for the first time in his 44 years he won’t be living in Dent County. He won’t be selling produce to friends and neighbors and making the short walk down the hill to work at a place he built on his own. Nor the fact that he is moving a family business that has been a Dent County institution since the 1970s. Nor the fact that only two of the Cahill clan – Barry and Stephen – still call Dent County home.
There is, he finally admits, a little sadness for him in leaving memories behind. The smell of marigolds that take him back to the 1970s when he worked side by side with his dad. The satisfaction he got when, over the years, he doubled the square footage of the greenhouses, taking an upstart that was his dad’s dream and turning it into what it is today. School days at Green Forest. Breakfast with the sizable Cahill clan at their home deep in the woods near Montauk.
This will always be home for the Cahills. “And it’s just 20 miles away,” Tim Cahill keeps reminding himself.
