Bootstrap Business: Earn Cash With your own Garden-grown Nursery

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Or you could establish your own catalog (or form your own co-op). Start with one, two or three specialty woodies and work your way into the business as time, space and funds allow.

What to Grow

Do some research to decide the best woodies to grow for your area. Visit nurseries and arboreta in your area to see what catches your fancy. Go on garden tours. Read catalogs and gardening magazines. Talk with Master Gardeners and Extension agents. A plant may be attractive to you because of its fragrance, shape or color, or because it feeds wildlife or reminds you of some special childhood memory. Among the plants that have “called out” to me are bayberry, white oak and willow. Birds love bayberry’s pewter-colored berries, which were used in candle-making in colonial New England. White oak features a majestic growth habit and strong wood. Willows are appealing for their many sizes, shapes, colors, uses (as in basket-making) and ease of growth. Clethra is attractive for its fragrance.

Be sure to select plants that do well in your local conditions — you’ll lose customers quickly if you offer species that aren’t winter-hardy in the North or drought-tolerant in the Southwest. On the other hand, you’ll do your customers a huge service by researching and offering top varieties for your region’s normal growing conditions.

Once you find a few plants that appeal to you, learn as much as you can about them. My favorite resource is Michael Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants: Their Identification, Ornamental Characteristics, Culture, Propagation and Uses. Plants are listed alphabetically by species (with an index of common names), and descriptions are concise, but the book is detailed enough to get you started.

After growing woody plants for several years, I have this tip to offer: Fast-growing, single-stemmed plants that do not produce suckers (underground runners that pop up around the plant) are the easiest and most profitable to grow. Bayberries are just the opposite: They sucker, and pulling weeds from among the suckers is difficult and time consuming. They also are low growing and have brittle stems that break easily, and they grow slowly so you are forced to wait a few years to get a return on your investment. In the meantime, perennial weeds easily become established in a row when you’re not digging plants out of it every couple of years. Still, I can’t seem to stop growing this handsome plant.

Propagating Woody Plants

To start plants from seed, look for good specimens growing in your area and ask homeowners if you can collect seed when it’s ready. Wyman’s Gardening Encyclopedia has an excellent section called “Seeds of Woody Plants” that discusses this subject in detail. It also has a valuable table of seed collection dates for Zone 5. For other areas, check with a woody ornamentals specialist at a land grant university. If you don’t want to collect your own seeds or can’t find them locally, you can order from a catalog.

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