Beginning a Mail Order Nursery business from your home, regardless of how large or small, requires being aware of the best methods to propagate and market plants.
1. Be Prepared
Planning starts about a month before the plant sale. This is also a time to organize your space for sales. It is essential to have everything set up in order to speak with your customers.
A chair and table near your entrance will draw customers to stop by. Make a listing of your plants and their prices. It’s impossible to remember all of it, particularly if you have a handful of species that have unique prices.
2. Be Colorful
The colors of your plant deal should be coordinated with the signs to post all over your area. Stearns utilizes neon green and neon pink. They’re visible even during overcast days. The signs are located at least two blocks from the sales in all directions. Don’t use cardboard for the backing since it can soak up water if raining on. Choose a plastic backing like the old signs for elections. Paint the background in hot pink and the letter as big as is conceivable. Dark acrylic marker and black paint last for a long time.
In your yard, you can use lots of colorful signs to identify your plant groups. Have Orange Justicia signs read in highlighter orange, and Pink Jacobinia in hot pink. Make sure to use a backing made of plastic too. Be successful starting from the beginning also, your signs will be worth it in time. Prices can be changed on the signs from year to year in order to account for the rate of inflation.
3. Do Your Research
Find out about the plants you plant online or go to your library prior to starting a tree nursery business at home. Print on a printer shaded duplicates of the information about every plant you’ll sell. Cover them all with plastic sheets and seal them to ensure that no moisture can be able to get inside. If you can address all of the questions (light or space, water needs) customers are more likely to buy plants that are suitable for particular locations in their backyard.
4. Label All Your Plants
Utilize a Sharpie pen on a popsicle stick. Convenience stores in the cheap range sell packages of between 100 and 150 for about $1. It can be boring. Play some song or play a baseball match in the background. The people who visit will bring the plants home, and they may not know about the plants. You will enjoy the ease of having the option to purchase an individual plant and keep it in mind to come back in the near future.
5. Be Passionate
Sell plants you love that fit a particular niche. Stearns has a wide selection of flowering plants. Pentas (red and pink, and rose) are very popular as are Pink Jacobinia and Thryallis. Individuals love both sun and shade plants. Stearns cultivates both nectar and host plants that attract butterflies. She also plants flowers and vegetables in the vegetable gardens, she can occasionally sell extra flowers or vegetable plants like tomatoes, kale, collards, and marigolds.
6. Start Them Yourself
Cutting beds are essential to propagate. Stearns’ bed is accessible, yet they need to be secured to her chicks. Label your cuttings and take care to look after them. There are some plants such as Thryallis, Bahama Cassia, and milkweed, that are best grown from seeds. A New York Fern nursery, no matter how basic, is a great thing to use to help germinate seeds inside. Profits increase when you grow your own plants and create a nursery at your home.
7. Don’t Mind Asking
For the past 10 years, Stearns has had two plant sales each year – a weekend from late May until early June and then a weekend in the middle of November. In the event of sales, the sign is left at the gate that indicates that she will accept any size pots customers are carrying. The people are kind and generous, leaving huge plastic bags of various dimensions of pots made from plastic that she utilizes for plant sales. Since you don’t have to buy pots the margin of profit increases.
8. Generate Soil
Mulching your lawn will eventually provide the most fertile soil to grow your crops. Stearns has seen tree trimming machines leave piles of branches and chipped leaves throughout the many years. She also gathers bags of chopped oak leaves from the surrounding area. These leaves decompose, leaving the soil with gorgeous dark color. A lot of relatives have cows which means she has access to the manure of cows to mix into her garden soil. The plants are benefited from this mix and it reduces the cost of your operation.
9. Think Convenience
Pots that are small are simpler to observe on tables. Stearns has invested some of his earnings and has purchased a few sets of sawhorses for tables for plants that are small. It’s also a good idea to put a few little cardboard boxes beneath the table to place their more modest plants in. A large container filled with plastic bags to place their gallon-sized or then again bigger estimated plants is a great idea and will be appreciated by a lot of customers.
