Build your plant business from clearance sales of Big Box Stores and larger plant nurseries.

The buying power of Big Box stores can really help you build your plant business. Selling plants is a very seasonal business in most parts of the United States. Large retailers bring in plants and treat them like 2″x4″s, they mark them up and move them out. The big box stores like the Home Depot bring in shrubs and plants in the spring and again in the fall. Plants require a lot of care and thus the big box stores do not want to keep them around out of season. Therefore, they are known to have big sales at the end of the spring and fall season. It is not uncommon to see plants, shrubs, and trees at 50% off at least twice per year. You can make this work for you!

So, how can you use this to your advantage? Plants that are at 40 to 50% off can be purchased and even just re-sold once they are back in season. For example a 1 gallon rhododendron purchased at 50% off of $16 is only $8.00 dollars. You could purchase this plant and resell it in 6 to 9 months. Just keep it watered, let it grow and sell it for $16 or more dollars. Perhaps even better you could take some cuttings from the plant to be rooted. You can and often should re-pot or up-pot the plant in a container one size up. Then wait about a year and sell your $8.00 rhododendron for $30, a nice profit, not to mention the free cuttings.

Free cuttings can help you build your plant business.

Another way the big box store sells can help you is to be your source for plants for making root cuttings. A plant purchased for less than $10 could provide you with dozens or more cuttings each year for many years to come.

You can successfully buy plants from big box stores or even local nurseries when they are on sale for 40 to 50% off. Working on a 40 to 50% margin is actually a good business model. When you let the plants grow out a little you can even do better. A successful strategy would be to buy many plants in the fall and winter them over. Up pot them to a larger container and perhaps take a few cuttings from them to root. Once they put on some new growth in the spring resell all those plants in the spring for 2 to 3 times what you paid for it. You would have to outlay some capital to buy many plants but the returns are there.

Build your Plant Business includes diversifying your plant offerings.

One of the really great things about buying plants on sale from the big box stores is you can diversify the selection of the plants that you sell. When it comes to shrubs and trees the box stores have a decent variety of Rhododendron, Junipers, Arborvitae, Azalea, Japanese red maple, Spirea and Hostas. Be assured, they only carry plants that sell! Buying 10 plants at a time can get you an immediate start into a new variety of plants. From 10 plants you should be able to take at least 10 cuttings for rooting from each, giving you 100 cuttings with the hope of at least 50-100% becoming small new plants. Follow our article on Planting and Propagating plants to turn these Big Box plants into perpetual cutting factories.

Pass on Patented plants.

Be careful to avoid patented plants. You may have to do a little research on a plants name or variety before purchasing to make sure the plant you are buying is not patented. You absolutely must avoid patented plants as the patent holder is rightfully due a royalty every time that plant is sold or propagated. Just avoid these. You can sell patented and trade marked plants if you buy them from a grower and pay the small royalty. We do grow some patented plants but we pay the royalty when we buy the liner. These plants cannot be asexually reproduced i.e. propagated by cuttings.

Trademarked plants are a little different story. Grower can trademark names for common cultivars such as a Thuga Arborvitae. They could give the plant a unique name such as Fireworks Arborvitae. The protection given here by the government is only for the name Fireworks Arborvitae. Growers do this to try and make common plants special. You can propagate these plants but you cannot reuse a Trademarked name. Don’t let this confuse you.

Early on we bought a lot of Big Box plants.

We helped jump start and build our plant business with Big Box clearance sales. The Big Box stores have very low prices and sell for less than the really nice garden centers in our area. A 2 foot Arborvitae at the garden center locally is $20 to 25.00, at the Home Depot it is $14.99. On clearance it is $7.50. We bought 100 of these one year and up potted them from 3 quart pots to 2 gallon. We took about 500 cuttings from them for rooting! Then let them fill out a little and sold them all for $20.00 each. That is a $11.00 (New pot and dirt was $1.50 each) profit per plant plus 500 free cuttings. We did put a few hours of work into this but were well rewarded.

Build your plant business year after year.

We plant to watch for plant sales each year, especially in October where we live. This gives us a nice price on a great plant. We can then take cuttings from these plants forever. We can also grow the plant out a pot size and resell them for 4 to 6 times what we paid for them. Sale plants also get us started with plants we are not already propagating. Its a big win for us.