To get into the business of selling plants you don’t need to start with huge loans and a full-size greenhouse.
Gardening has always been immensely popular in the United States. However, the current worldwide rise in food prices cannot help but drive an American return to the days of the Victory gardens of World War II, with people trying to supplement their food budget with veggies grown in backyard plots, containers, and window boxes.
Like many small businesses, you can start simple and actually get underway within a month.
Get Started
Propagation techniques and growing from seed allows you, at minimal cost, to launch your business by producing any number of starter plants you want and that space allows you to handle.
Remember: there’s always a market for starter plants: many people would rather buy established seedlings than a pack of seeds.
With effortless pre-planning, you should anticipate the season, whether for fall flowers, spring garden vegetables, or year-round houseplants.
People are always interested in houseplants, but with food prices the way they are, they may do very well with well-tended vegetable plants you would grow from seed rather than cutting. Certainly you can compete with the ratty-looking vegetable seedlings offered at local grocery stores.
First Step
The simplest approach imaginable is to put out a couple of (cookie sheet) flats with sprouted seedlings or cuttings inserted into potting soil in peat pots for your next yard sale. Put up a little sign announcing you price per plant, and go from there.
The next step beyond this begins with you haunting local garage sales looking for materials you can use, such as discarded peat pots, gardening tools, or half-emptied bags of potting soil.
If you arrive early, you may occasionally even see, as I have and probably almost everyone has on rare occasions, a fully-grown potted houseplant offered for a paltry 50 cents or so which can be resold, with or without sprucing up. This is easy money, don’t pass it up.
Also check out your local auction.
Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch….
As you acquire pots and other materials, consider the what you can do through propagation.
Some quick examples.
A jade plant can be propagated by removing the leaves from a mature plant you may have paid $3 or $4 for or got even cheaper at a sale. Don’t take all the leaves because you want to keep the original plant.
Use food cans for rooting and get some sand for a rooting medium. Consider using a piece of cloth as a wick, leading from a saucer of water up into the sand to make sure it stays damp. Now, each leaf taken from the mature jade plant is laid on the dampened sand in each container and allowed to take root. Do some research before proceeding. Bottom line: you can produce a couple dozen seedlings off one of these cool looking plants for free. Keep in mind in calculating your success that they don’t grow terribly fast. You may have better luck removing and rooting small branches from the plant so that you have something more resembling a plant when it does take root.
You’ll have better luck with an easy-to-propagate spider plant. A nice big, leafy spider plant (airplane plant), produces long, thin leaves that flow out and down as do a few wiry stems that produce “mini-me” plantlets at the end. Those are called babies and can be allowed to root in their own containers without even clipping them from the parent plant until firmly established. A nice productive spider plant can produce a handful of spider plants which you can offer. The sale of the rooted babies could even recompense you for purchasing the parent plant which will, in time, produce even more babies, making the investment in a new plant worthwhile.
Much better are philodendrons, nice, leafy plants that lend themselves well to propagation. Here you only root a cutting in damp sand or even in a glass of water, then transplant. Consider quality vs. quantity. A number of small cuttings will produce starter plants but, then again, a good, leafy cutting will produce a fuller and more marketable plant.
Get a few books on propagation and study it for other possibilities. You will probably want to focus on plants that will produce quicker results, like the spider plant. The slower-growing specimens like snake plants will take up room you can use to start other plans.
Seek Cuttings
You can, with permission, take cuttings from friends’ plants. A cutting from a houseplant here, a Chinese evergreen there, soon you have a greenhouse full of plants that you are raising, even if you don’t actually have the greenhouse.
Containers
There’s another marketing angle we can consider that will help you sell plants at a higher price than they might otherwise get. Concentrate on unusual containers and you can create an appealing plant and planter combination. Of course, this may lend itself best to more mature plants but you can experiment.
What kind of containers? Check garage sales and auctions. A nice planter can be worth the 25 cents or so it might cost so that you can combine it with something like that nice, rooted philodendron cutting you’ve been working with. Garage sales abound with cute and inexpensive planters.
Don’t stop here. Get creative. Use other items for planters including teapots and coffee pots. I’ve heard of a boot making a popular planter item. Use your imagination. And don’t pay much. Buying cheap allows you latitude to experiment.
Marketing
You can stockpile your plants for your next yard sale or you can hold a plant sale instead of a yard sale. Many towns have farmer’s markets where a table full of starter planters and houseplants would fit in neatly.
At the same time, you can talk to customers about the plants you will soon have available, perhaps even print out a business card on your computer along with an information sheet listing your current offerings. These smaller sales offer a good chance to make contacts.
You can also volunteer to give free talks on propagating plants to local club meetings, the library, that sort of thing. Just ask that they must allow you to set up your plants in back and sell them. For a little retail sideline, start picking up books on gardening at library book sales and offer them with a profitable mark-up.
If you have a spare room, you can set it up to sell plants or use the garage, if zoning permits.
In fact, at some point, will need to register with the county and get a sales tax number from the state.
Perhaps now you rezlie that you can start towards your dream of having a greenhouse operation with minimal effort on a very small, part time basis.
Reference:
- Spring Eco-Friendly Lawn and Garden Tips www.associatedcontent.com/article/731159/spring_ecofriendly_lawn_and_garden.html
