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$How to Make Money Growing Rooted Cuttings and Selling them Wholesale
by Michael J. McGroarty -
www.freeplants.com
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 nurseryman call the little plants that they buy
to plant out in the field or in containers. Lining out
stock, or liners for short.
“Nurseryman buy plants?” You might be asking.
Yes they
do. Nurseryman 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 about 6,000 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.
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