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BackYard Plant Nursery Tips

Backyard Plant Nursery – 8 great tips

Backyard Plant Nursery Tips No 1 saves you labor – When starting a backyard plant nursery, one of the best things we ever decided to do was to plant our plants in containers and never in the ground. We always select the size container that the plant will be sold in. Always try to eliminate digging or breaking of ground, it isn’t necessary. We are very rarely potting up plants again in larger pots, almost never. It is decided in advance how large the plants will be when we want to sell them. Plants are potted in appropriate size pots right from the beginning. While we may tie up some money in larger pots for a longer time, we eliminate all the labor of re-potting.

Backyard Plant Nursery Tip No 2 – Less weeding.

Weed Prevention Plant Nursery Tip

 

Using a pre-emergent weed preventer is an enormous time saver for us. Stop weeds before they start! Weeding hundreds or thousands of plants is hard work.  Weeding several times per year is an enormous task. We are also beginning to experiment with mulching our plants with inexpensive materials like free wood chips. Weed control discs that stop weeds but that let water pass through them look interesting. Very possible we could cut out our own from weed barrier cloth. The small cost per plant of using pre-emergent weed killers weed reducing discs far exceeds the cost and bother of hand weeding. You can purchase Preen Weed Preventer in larger bags right from Amazon.

Saving space No 3 – a Backyard Nursery tip worth considering.

Saving space also equals saving time in your starting a backyard plant nursery. We have been experimenting with planting our plants in different size pots, depending on how large we intend on growing them. For example we grow 3 varieties of Spruce trees in 3 and 5 gallon pots. The 3 gallon trees are ready for sale in about 2 seasons. The 5 gallon plants will take 3 to 4 seasons to grow out.

Placing smaller pots between the larger ones saves a lot of space initially and saves a lot of water when watering. When the smaller plants are ready to sell, they can be removed to leave more space for the plants that will remain for 2 more years. Less touching, watering and moving saves a large amount of labor.

No 4 – Save time and water by watering plants efficiently

Backyard Plant Nursery Tip Watering

 

When you are first starting a starting a backyard plant nursery, your watering plan may not be well thought out. You might just water each individual plant by hand. As you start to grow hundreds or thousands of plants you really need to think your watering plan through. Running some white plastic PVC pipe in a permanent pattern where you can turn off and on sections makes a lot of sense. Use PVC pipe, it is very inexpensive and all you need to do is run some pipe and add a few valves. Moving sprinkler heads around is time consuming.

 

We have experienced some very dry periods in the summer, having hoses and extra sprinkler heads run is a life saver. This is especially true if you are still working and need to water before or after work. See our page on our Backyard Nursery Irrigation for more ideas about watering your plants.

No 5 – Try to use everything in your Backyard Plant Nursery.

Anytime we are pruning plants we try to use the cuttings to make more plants. Most all of the trimmings from a plant pruning can be used to attempt to make rooted cuttings. We don’t do this on every type of plant however it is very easy to do on some plants. It’s discouraging to take a foot off of 100 dogwood trees and throw away all the branches. We will generally attempt to root material like this and often it will root. Then you will have another new plant.

Growing Arborvitaes is another good example, after some new growth emerges in the spring, you may wish to prune your arborvitae’s to shape them up. Very often cuttings like this from a plant like an Arborvitae will root quite readily. This also works on plants once they go dormant too and you can harvest some hardwood cuttings. Certainly you would not want to just throw all these pruning clippings away .

No 6 – Getting some help really adds to Backyard Plant Nursery production.

We have been overly ambitious at times and ordered in a lot of plants. Often times they will all come in around the same time and we find we can become a little frantic potting up plants. We do want them all planted in no more than a few days. We have done two things to help with this. One is getting some help, it’s easy enough to find a couple of people or your children to commit to 2 to 5 big planting days per year. No experience required. Just moving pots around is a big help. The second thing we have done is learn how to quickly heal plants in so that we can take more time and spread their potting out over many more days. We want to pot everything while it’s still dormant, but there is only so much you can do in a day.

Larger plant pots and raised beds

If we receive 1,000 plants and have a couple bad days of weather, the plants are just out of soil too long.

2 x 4 foot Fabric Raised Bed
Use something similar to these 2’x4′ rectangular growing beds and a soil mixture that’s mostly peat moss and perlite. We find we can heal these plants in and hold them for a few weeks or a whole year if needed. You can plant 100 plants in 10 to 20 minutes. These rectangular planting containers are super handy and we’re going to begin to use them when rooting cuttings as well.

No 7 – Tag your nursery plants early.

Planting up hundreds or thousands of bare root plants that are dormant and have no leaves on them will lead to a big mess for you. We find it is just best to tag your plants early so that you never have a moment when you don’t know what a plant is.

No 8 – Even More Backyard Plant Nursery Tips

Buying some equipment can help save you a lot of time in your nursery. As your nursery grows, you’re going to want to add some larger wagons, extra wheelbarrows, more hand tools, and better watering equipment. Don’t be shy about reinvesting some of your profits. Once you get to a certain point, it may make a lot of sense to add a small tractor to your nursery operation. Either one that can pull a decent size cart or one that has a bucket loader. Having a bucket loader to mix potting soil and potting mixes is just so nice. This is a tremendous time saver. For many people, they may already have a tractor with a bucket loader especially if you already own some property.

You may also be able to find a trailer or a larger cart to help you move plants around your nursery. These can even be purchased used and if in good condition should work perfectly for you. We are currently using an off road only, farm wagon that is 16′ x 6′ that we find very useful. In addition we have road titled 12′ utility trailer that we use off road too. Both of these trailers are used to move and display plants. They are also movable display stands that are easily refilled from our growing area.

We hope to add to this list of Backyard Plant Nursery tips as we discover more. Check back from time to time as we continue Growing Our Retirement as we learn and share.

Some quick links to get you to some important articles quickly

Starting a backyard plant nursery – Getting Started
Starting a plant nursery – For those starting a larger nursery
How to start a plant nursery Start a plant nursery with a low investment
Retirement Investment – Plants can be a good retirement investment
Start a business before you retire – Now is the time!
Backyard Nursery Resources – Our ever growing resources guide for your backyard Plant Nursery
Planting in the Fall or Spring, which is best?
Pruning Spruce Trees for the best health and profit
Propagating Japanese Andromedas
Propagating Variegated Wintercreeper Euonymus

 

 

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