PROFITABLE HERB GROWING
(Page 7 of 9)
March/April 1971
By the Mother Earth News editors
Along with store demonstrations, take advantage of every opportunity to speak at garden clubs, womens' organizations, church groups, or civic gatherings. Whenever you appear at these functions, take along plenty of samples to pass out. Regardless of how good your business becomes, continue promoting and advertising. Coca Cola sells hundreds of millions of bottles a day, but the more it is sold, the more it is advertised. Eventually you should have designed a distinctive emblem that you use on your letterheads, truck, packages and even on the sign of your herb farm. It will pay you to have an experienced industrial artist to do this work for you.
RELATED CONTENT
GROWING HERB PLANTS AND SEEDS TO SELL
This phase of the herb business is the nursery end and will require at least an acre area to be profitable. It holds unlimited opportunities because you can retail right off your own place, wholesale your products through stores or use mailorder selling.
Gardening is America's number one hobby and that is why selling to gardeners is such a paying field.
HERB PLANTS AND SEEDS FOR THE BEE-KEEPER
Here at our nursery where we keep a few colonies of bees for plant pollination we are always able to sell honey at a fancy price. The same customers come back every year to buy all of our surplus because our honey has a unique flavor that comes from the herb plants in our fields. Many bee-keepers throughout the country are becoming aware of this fact and are planting some herbs in their bee pastures. Bee-keepers can be enormous markets for herb plants and seeds. These people will buy plants by the thousands and seeds by the pounds.
Bees will avidly forage the nectar from practically all herb plants, but the best ones to sell bee-keepers are hyssop, rosemary, sage, thymes, and lemon balm. Borage seed is in very great demand. We once got an order for 200 pounds of this seed from a large beekeeper in Nevada but, unfortunately, we could not supply it.
HERB PLANTS THAT SELL WELL TO GARDENERS
Both annual and perennial herbs can be sold locally. Among the most popular are angelica, lemon balm, the basils, salad burnet, catnip, chamomile, chives, costmary, fennel, germander, horehound, hyssop, lavender, lovage, sweet marjoram, sorrel, French tarragon (the biggest seller of all herbs), the thymes, sweet woodruff, wormwood, yarrow and oregano.
HERB SEEDS THAT SELL WELL TO GARDENERS
For beginners we recommend gathering seed of the annual variety of herbs, and only a few of the perennial varieties. This business of raising seeds for gardeners is very specialized, requires considerable skill and some equipment. Here you must gather your seeds so that they have a high germination percentage. Seeds grown for culinary use are not so exacting in their requirements, because germination is of little or no importance. But for those who would like to try their hand at this phase of the herb business, the recommended variety of seeds to grow are: angelica, anise, the basils, borage, salad burnet, caraway, catnip, chervil, chives, coriander, dill, fennel, horehound, hyssop, lavender, lovage, sweet marjoram, rosemary, rue, summer savory, the sorrels, the thymes and yarrow. Use the same procedure for gathering these seeds as you would for those gathered for culinary purposes. Since space does not permit us to give complete instructions on seed production, we recommend your public library as a source of books that deal with the subject in greater detail.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 | 7 |
8 |
9 |
Next >>
