GROWING GREENBACKS
The McGroarty Backyard Nursery: a family business that earns them thousands of dollars a year on less than an acre.
How to start a backyard nursery.
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Growing plants for retail or wholesale is
an interesting and fun way to earn money while involving
the whole family. You don't need much land (our backyard
nursery is only 1/20 of an acre), you can grow thousands of
plants at a time, and you earn several thousand dollars a
year... working right at home
Starting a nursery in your backyard is probably easier than
you think. When most people think of a plant nursery they
visualize huge greenhouses, tractors and other expensive
equipment. The fact is, as a backyard grower you don't need
any of those things to get started. All you need is a small
area to start growing some plants and a little bit of
information on landscape plant propagation. Thankfully,
there are many simple and easy propagation techniques that
are easy to learn and work really well.
PROPAGATING TECHNIQUES
Seeds
One of the local wholesale nursery owners in our area has
been buying our plants for years. She grows thousands of
her own plants, but at times local demand outweighs her
supply, so she buys from us, marks up the price a little,
and takes care of her customers. Usually she goes for the
white, pink and Chinese dogwoods we grow.
As it turns out, white and Chinese dogwoods are quite easy
to grow from seed, and you should plant them as soon as
they're ripe and start falling from the trees in September.
Collect the seeds and soak them in water for about a week,
then squeeze them between your fingers to separate the
pulp. Put the seeds in a pail filled with water so that
they sink to the bottom, leaving the pulp on top to be
washed away when the water starts to overflow. Afterward,
fill a kitchen blender halfway with water and slowly add
the seeds, allowing them to churn for a minute or so (run
the blender at a slow speed, just fast enough to keep the
mixture turning). This process nicks the hard outer shell
of the seeds, allowing water and oxygen to penetrate the
husks and trigger the germination process.
Dry the seeds and immediately sow them on top of a bed of
weed-free topsoil. Cover the seeds with approximately 3/16
inches of soil (not too deep!). Then, cover the bed with
hardware cloth or screen to keep birds and small animals
from eating the seeds. At the first sign of germination in
the spring, remove the screen.
Interestingly, seeds collected from a pink dogwood are
likely to flower white, and most of the time the accepted
method for producing pink dogwoods involves grafting a bud
or a small twig from a pink tree onto a white dogwood
seedling. The introduction of "intermittent mist," however,
has made it possible to root pink dogwood cuttings on their
own. Intermittent mist is an automatic watering system that
applies a fine spray of water to cuttings every few minutes
during daylight hours. As an example, we just planted
several thousand cuttings last week and have them under
intermittent mist. They receive a 12-second spray of water
every ten minutes starting at 9:00 a.m. and ending at 7:30
p.m. Some of them will be rooted in two weeks; almost all
of them will be rooted in six weeks. It's a fairly simple
system, but it requires a timer, a transformer, and an
electric solenoid valve to control the watering cycle. The
investment can be around $360 if you buy a system, or about
$225 if you build your own. This is something you might
want to consider once your nursery is making a fair profit.
In the meantime there are many other plants with
inexpensive propagation techniques that you can use.
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