25? Put Us In The Herb Business
March/April 1971
By Dolly Loepp
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY KEITH SHOEMAKER
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You certainly don't need a rich uncle, complicated equipment or a lot of land to set you up in the herb business. You can make your own beginning with little more than a 25¢ packet of seeds. Herb growing is easy and inexpensive and almost anyone with a backyard-sized plot (or even less!) can establish quite a profitable operation. You'd better be careful if you try it, though, because even the tiniest start can soon snowball into a rather large homestead enterprise. Consider the following case, for instance:
A couple of warm-hearted, down-to-earth people I know—who prefer to remain nameless—are in the business, and when they opened their herb and gift shop recently, I went up for a visit.
When I walked into the new shop, the clean, fresh,healthy smell of spicy herbs made my nose tingle. In side were wicker baskets piled high with dried herbs, and one wall—done in rough old barnwood framed with burlap-covered cornices—displayed a rainbow of dried flowers and grasses. The shelves were chock-fullof old-timey herb jellies, sugars and vinegars, and a beautiful antique parlor stove—polished to perfection gleamed in one corner. Next to the stove, on an old wooden bench, were bags of confections . . . the kind you won't find in a modern candy store. A big pic ture window held racks of already-arranged herbs and ,flowers in quaint, old fashioned containers and a near by greenhouse was stuffed with little pots of herbplants to set in kitchen windows and over forty varieties of herbs to plant in the garden.
From the looks of the shop, I was convinced that the herb business had to be good! But was it difficult to get into? Over a freshly brewed cup of mint tea, the proprietor of the new shop told me how his family had set up the operation.
About six years ago I paid a quarter for the seeds and planted a 20-foot row of sweet basil. That was the beginning of our herb business. But let me tell you how we happened to plant herbs in the first place.
A couple of years back, (before our `basil year' as we call it) we had a run of bad luck. Mostly, it was our fault. We were a couple of 'city slickers' back then—I'd been a factory worker and my wife, an elevator operator—and we didn't know too much about farming. We kind of lost our heads—plus a couple of sizeable down payments—over some heavy farm equipment which we didn't need at all. Our soil is light and sandy. But we were "green" and back then, the people around here weren't as friendly or helpful as they are now.
Anyway, the income from our fruit and vegetable crop, which we sold at the Farmer's Market in Cleveland, didn't come near to covering the blunders we made. Then, with our three youngsters to raise and a few other expenses thrown in, we almost lost the farm. I went back to factory work and—in my spare time—put in some plum tomatoes, scrounged up a pile of scrap lumber and built a 5' X 10' roadside stand in front of the house.
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