How to Get Free Plants, Can it be Done?
Free nursery plants? Yes, absolutely. Starting a small plant nursery is a rewarding venture that combines passion for growing plants with the opportunity to enhance your current or retirement income. Whether you’re just beginning your journey or looking to expand your existing operation, understanding how to get free nursery plants can significantly reduce your startup costs and increase profitability. In this article, we’ll delve into practical strategies to source plants at no cost, leveraging techniques such as plant propagation. By adopting these methods, you can grow a diverse and robust nursery, offering a variety of popular plants. Let’s explore how you can enhance your nursery’s growth potential while keeping your expenses in check.
How to get free plants – watch our video:
Taking and Rooting Cuttings from your own plants
Our top way to create new and free nursery plants is by taking cuttings from our existing plants. We already have plants on our property, so we are always rooting them to create new plants. This is called asexual reproduction. Plants normally reproduce by reseeding themselves, but you can easily reproduce plants from cuttings. We also take hundreds of free cuttings from our current nursery stock as we prune them for shape.
This all depends on where you live in the country and what types of plants you want to grow? Do grow plants that sell, this is highly recommended! We are going to focus here mostly on woody shrubs, that is what we grow. You can typically go from a cutting to a salable plant in about two to three seasons. Plan for the longest and try to do better. If you’re starting on a small budget, you may, in fact want to grow some faster growing plants where you can start to sell some plants in as little as one year. Good examples would be Hosta’s, Hydrangeas, and Perennials.
Get hundreds of free plants from cuttings
Taking cuttings from plants that are on your property is free, relatively easy, and you have two opportunities per year to attempt to root cuttings. The two opportunities are soft wood cuttings taken in the late spring / early summer and hardwood cuttings, which can be taken , any time plants are dormant. We take hardwood cuttings in Dec-Early March. See our articles on Plant Propagation. Since we have many plants on our property (And always adding) that are dedicated to be used as cutting stock we take cuttings at least two times per year from these plants. We’d like to do batches of 80 to 100 cuttings at a time in a clear plastic tote.
We will take some soft wood cuttings in June/July and then we take some more hardwood cuttings in months like February or early March. We do this to ensure that we get enough rooted plants each year to fulfill the amount of plants we want to start that year. Not every batch is 100% successful and some batches of cuttings are more successful than others. If we are not really successful with softwood cuttings, we can still make up for it with hardwood cuttings.
Cuttings from around our property include various Junipers, Forsythia, Azalea, Rhododendrons, Arborvitae, PJM, Rhododendron’s, Lilac, and Dogwoods. We are adding to these plants each year so that we have more and more mother plants for cutting stock. We will always buy bare root plants to grow out and sell. Because they are small our rooted cuttings are one to two seasons behind the rooted transplants and liners we buy. Taking and rooting our own cuttings does allow us to become more and more self-sufficient in our nursery just by taking cuttings of plants we already have.
Get Free Plants from Cuttings from Friends and Family
Let it be known to friends and family that you are looking for cuttings from plants. You might offer to help prune plants/shrubs for others in exchange for getting some cuttings. Many people have someone overgrown plants that grow rapidly like forsythia. You could help them with some pruning and trimming and walk away with some great cuttings. Just make sure to always keep, your cuttings wet when transporting them or holding them for many hours at a time.
If you were going to offer free pruning services to friends family, you should probably spend some time learning how to prune. Look for videos on YouTube for the the varieties you are asked to prune. You certainly don’t want to go in and make a mess for someone. It’s always best to start pruning lightly rather than heavily. It is possible you might be able to help an elderly family member or friend keep their property in shape and get a bunch of cuttings to root. Look around too, you might even see a property that looks a little overgrown and offer to help.
Free plants from End of Season Sales.
At first it may sound like this costs a lot of money upfront. You can actually make money in two different ways. At the end of each growing season in our area, around late October. All the big box stores like The Home Depot and garden centers have 40%, to even 60% off sales. We will go buy plants for two reasons. Reason number one is to obtain some plants to take cuttings from. If we can get an 18″ to 24″ inch Arborvitae for $10 to 15.00 and get 30 cuttings from it we call that almost free cuttings.
Reason number two is after we take some cuttings we can choose to resell or flip these plants in one season. We will pot these often root bound plants up into larger containers and then within one year sell them for much more than we paid for them. A good example would be an Azalea plant from a big box store that’s originally $30 that is put on sale for $15. We will pot that plant up from a trade 1 gallon pot to a trade 3 gallon pot. We will then generally let it grow out for about one year take a bunch of free cuttings and resell that plant for at least $35-$40.
If we were to sell the plant for $35 and paid $15 for it, we will have more than doubled our money in one year, less only the cost of the pot. We will also take 10 or more cuttings from that plant over the course of the year and have thus received the 10 or even more cuttings for free.
We keep some of the plants we buy on clearance.
Sometimes we do choose to keep the plants that are purchased 
at 50% off.
We plant them in our yard, and then take cuttings each year. You may prefer not tying up money for a long time. You can still get free cuttings and make a profit on each plant. Just get into a cycle of growing purchased plants out and reselling the plant quickly. Or just sell off enough plants to recoup your initial investment and keep some for future cuttings. Selling 1/2 of the plants should more than get you your initial investment back. Then you have 1/2 the plants for cuttings for many years into the future.
We are of course, always talking about non-patented plants when we talk about buying them from a big box store or garden center. Read more about patented and trademarked plants.
Get free plants to help diversify your nursery
We do find we can purchase many non-patented yet more interesting varieties of plants at garden centers. Often the big box stores stick to the very basics, but even growing basic non-patented plants will keep you very busy. We got started with Azaleas, some of the Junipers, Holly, Emerald Green Arborvitaes and many others this way. Buy at 50% off sales, take cuttings, up pot the plants and then keep some plants and sell some. We don’t have any money invested in these plants anymore. In fact we have made profits on all of them but it did take $200.00 to 300.00 to get started. Just watch out for Patented plants, you cannot propagate and sell Patented plants.
How to Get Free Plants from Landscapers.
Another great way to find free plants is to make friends with a few landscapers who may be hired to remove large, overgrown plants and replace them with smaller ones. You might offer to lend some of your labor on a plant rip out job. In exchange, you might receive some very large plants that need pruning and could yield some great cuttings. These mature plants could even be planted in your yard to enjoy. I once had a friend who charged people to remove overgrown plants. Find an area with mature neighborhoods and you will find mature plants. After he charged customers for removing plants he would take them all home. He would plant them, prune them way back, and grow them out. Eventually, he had hundreds of beautiful plants on his property. Imagine how much propagation he could have been doing.
Watch and place ads on marketplace.
People often grow tired of plants or they become too large for their location. People offer plants for free or for sale on Facebook Marketplace. You may also be able to place an ad looking for people who want shrubs and trees removed . Often I see people place ads for shrubs, asking for payment for them. However, I don’t think they’re often very successful in finding people who will come pay and dig plants out for them. Try contacting people like this and make a counter offer of removing the plant for free. A few may take you up on this.
Some caution to be observed when doing this. Some people may require you to refill the whole you dug to remove the plant with dirt. If that is the case, you may be able to do that with some dirt in 5 gallon pails or you may just want to pass on to something else.
How to Get Free Plants from Divisions
Yet another way to get plants for free is by dividing them. Plants such as Hosta’s and other tubers and perennials can be divided, grown and divided again. Plants that grow from rhizomatous roots are perfect for multiplying by division. To propagate plants by division for your nursery you will need to establish some large plants to divide smaller plants from each year. You may even want to establish some “Parent Plant” beds where you keep a large stock of plants to keep dividing. Once you get this going you could have free plants for life!
Keep on looking for free plants.
At first it may seem difficult to find free plants however after awhile, we have found the plants begin to find you. Your yard, friends, landscapers and clearance sales will quickly get you working on lots of potting and growing projects. How fast you want to expand your nursery will depend on you and your efforts.
Helpful Links:
Plant Propagation
How to Make Money with Plants
Buy or Root Your own Cuttings
Backyard Nursery Resources Guide
Our Plant Nursery Start Up Series
How to Start a Plant Nursery – With super low start-up costs.
How to Get Free Plants – Your secret start up advantage
Propagate Plants All Year – Always be propagating
Make Your Own Potting mix – Inexpensively for your nursery
Propagate plants by Dividing A Great Way to Increase your Nursery Plant Inventory