GUILDERLAND — On the same land where he grew up and his father owned a vegetable farm, Bob Pigliavento, together with his wife, Linda, has run a greenhouse business, offering bedding plants and potted flowers to the public for almost 35 years.

He calls himself semi-retired, announcing his new status to each customer who comes along. This spring he has consolidated his flowers from 18 greenhouses, down to just two. He has no flats or bedding plants now, only potted plants and hanging pots.

He may or may not open at all next summer. “I wasn’t going to do anything this year.”

He just doesn’t want to keep on going and going until something happens to his health, or his wife’s, to keep them from being able to have some time when they can relax.

“It’s time for me and my wife to do something,” Pigliavento, 70, said. “That’s what we worked all these hours for.”

Asked what they want to do, he wasn’t entirely sure. He wants to visit his son in Florida and see his son’s new house, maybe take some more cruises.

“I’d like to go to Italy, and, if I do get there, see where my grandfather came from. It’s a little place right outside of Rome — Montefiascone or something? I’m not sure how you pronounce it.”

He was drafted and sent to Vietnam soon after he married Linda, and he spent two years and nine months in combat with the Navy on the coast, on the airplane carrier the U.S.S. Hancock.

It was after he came back, in 1969, that they started the business. At first, they sold plants and flowers wholesale, to other garden centers. They started out with just one 2-by-4-foot greenhouse.

They’ve been open to the public for 34 years, he said.

What will he miss? The people, he says. And “having a good crop, having everybody tell you how pretty stuff looks.”

The life of a gardener is a demanding one, Pigliavento reflected. It has been a seven-day-a-week, 15-hour-a-day job all these decades. “You gotta be here, open the doors, close the doors, turn the fans on, make sure the fans don’t come on when it’s zero degrees out.”

He gestured toward the greenhouse right behind him. “Like here, if these doors weren’t open, everything would be pretty well cooked by now.”

“It’s hard on the family. In the summer, other people are always going away and you’re stuck here. But we always managed to take the kids somewhere in the wintertime.”

Linda is “the gunner,” he says, “the main cog.” She’s the “money lady, the business, that’s her.” And she worked with the plants too, doing all the potting and transplanting.

Basically, he says, “She was here every waking minute with me, are you kidding? Without her, there wouldn’t have been a business.”

They raised two children, now grown: the son in Florida and a daughter in Guilderland. Neither of them wants to take over.

That’s fine with Pigliavento. “That’s what I educated them for! This is OK if you love it.”

A lot of customers who come by, he says, once rode with flowers in wagons pulled by their mothers many years ago; they visit now with their own grown children.

“Truth of the matter is, I just never thought I’d get this old, this quick. My dad told me, he’d say, ‘You’ll get your turn.’”