How to Make Money Growing Rooted Cuttings and
Selling them Wholesale
by Michael J. McGroarty
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Once you know how to effectively propagate landscape plants,
you will soon have more rooted cuttings than you can use. At
that time you can decide whether or not you should quit growing
cuttings, since you have all you need, or maybe you like to sell
some of your cuttings to a wholesale grower.
Let's discuss how easy it is to start a business selling
lining out stock. That’s what nurserymen call the little
plants that they buy to plant out in the field or in containers.
Lining out stock, or liners for short.
“Nurserymen buy plants?” You might be asking.
Yes they do. Nurserymen probably buy more plants than any
other group of people in the country. Why would they buy them if
they know how to grow them?
Because sometimes they can’t grow them fast enough to keep
up with the demand. Or maybe they would like to grow a certain
variety of plant, but can’t grow it themselves because they
don’t have any place to get several thousand cuttings. So what
they do is buy in rooted cuttings, plant them in the field or in
containers, and then they either grow them on to sell, or they
grow them on and just keep them around a year or two longer so
they can take cuttings from them.
Then once they have a supply of their own plants they can
sell the ones they bought in, that are now landscape size. Does
this make sense?
Let’s say that Mary the nursery owner buys 1,000 Variegated
Weigela rooted cuttings @ 50¢ each. She plants them in the
field in the early spring and they take off growing like crazy.
That summer she goes out and takes 3 cuttings from each plant
(They need pruning away, right?).
She sticks those 3,000 cuttings under intermittent mist and
in about 5 weeks she has 3,000 rooted cuttings that she can
plant out that fall, and she does just that. The following
summer she can get about6,000 cuttings from the original 1000
plants that she bought, plus another
9,000 cuttings from the
3,000 she planted out last fall.
That’s a total of 12,000
cuttings.
She continues to plant her rooted cuttings out in the field
and keeps taking cuttings from them until she has all she wants
to grow. From then on she can take as many cuttings as she needs
from the plants that she has in the field.
By now the original
1,000 plants that she bought @ 50¢ each are large enough to dig
and sell, and they are worth $10.00 to $15.00 each wholesale.
That’s $8,000 from a $500 investment, plus she can produce as
many variegated weigela as she wants without buying any more
cuttings.
Does it really happen this way? Yes it does. I was recently
talking to a friend who grows and sells all kinds of plants and
he told me that he has been buying Dwarf Alberta Spruce cuttings
and growing them on and selling them. He doesn’t even root any
himself, he just buys 5,000 every year, pots them up and sells
them wholesale. How many other nurseryman across the country do
you suppose do that?
To get started you can either buy a stock plant or two, or
buy several hundred cuttings of the variety that you would like
to sell. Instead of planting them out in the field, I would
plant them in beds. Make each bed 4’ wide so you can reach the
center to weed and take cuttings, and place the plants in the
bed 10” apart.
As long as you keep taking cuttings the plants will remain
fairly small, and compact. Then after a two or three years dig
them up, put them in pots and sell them. By then you will have
thousands more coming on that you can take cuttings from. Start
out slow until you know what there is a market for.
Michael J. McGroarty is the author of this article. Visit his
most interesting website, http://www.freeplants.com
and sign up for his excellent gardening newsletter. Article
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