SK couple hoping they’ve planted seeds for success

For Joe Sullivan and wife Sabrina Beretta, owners of Jobrina Hydroseeding, business was so good they brought it home.

Port Orchard natives, the couple relocated to Anchorage, Alaska, in 1999 when Sabrina found a job doing quality control for a fish processing company. Joe accompanied her without the promise of a job but with a background in landscaping.

“I’d been doing hydroseeding for about 15 years for a company in Everett,” he said. “I pretty quickly realized there was a lot of opportunity in Alaska for a landscaper.”

Alaskan yards are covered with snow eight months of the year, but “When the weather does warm up and things start growing, people in Alaska are passionate about making their homes and their lawns look nice,” Sullivan said.

He decided to do what he knew best — start a hydroseeding and landscaping company. “It took off and exceeded our wildest dreams,” Sullivan said. “Every year we were in business, we doubled our revenues from the previous year.”

Even so, it wasn’t long before the couple felt the pull to return to Washington. “We figured if we were doing this well in Alaska, we could do even better back where the growing season lasts half the year,” Sullivan said.

They founded Jobrina Hydroseeding in December, this time working together from their Salmonberry Road home.

The company specializes in hydroseeding — spraying a mix of wood, mulch seed. fertilizer and water on prepared sections of ground in order to cultivate a lush, green lawn.

“With the machine we use,” Sullivan said, “we can do a sod-quality lawn for about half the cost of sod.”

The sort of work Jobrina can do was only possible once with bigger hydroseeding machines. But Sullivan says his $15,000 unit, which sits on a small trailer, can do just as much for a lot cheaper.

A typical hydroseeding job runs $300 to $400, he said.

In addition to hydroseeding, the couple can also do a variety of other landscaping chores, including brick walkways, retaining walls, fencing and design and installation of plant material.

“Most customers tend to want to have all the work done by the same contractor,” Sullivan said.

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