Plant nursery side hustle to earn $10,000 per year!

$10,000 per year plant nursery side hustle or retirement business, can you start one? You most certainly can! $10,000 isn’t even a stretch goal, you could make much more. Read further and then read our article Starting a Backyard Plant Nursery and how your plant nursery can be an excellent Retirement Investment

A great way to earn extra income now or in retirement is by starting and operating a small plant nursery. Many people want to make extra money or keep busy in retirement. Almost everyone can use some additional income. In in fact, almost all of us could benefit from some additional income now and in retirement.

How to start your plant nursery side hustle?

This website will take you step-by-step through starting a backyard nursery. How to start, how to grow, and how to sell. So, how much would you have to grow to earn a net income of $10,000 per year? Let’s first look at your costs and expected profits to then see how large a nursery you would have to operate. You might be surprised! By the way an extra $10,000 in income per year is significant. You could pay off debt, pay off your mortgage early, save and invest. Once you are earning $10,000 you will know what you are doing and can start scaling up to an even larger goal.

This article is about making an extra $10,000 per year. However, these principles apply and will work for almost any size nursery. You could certainly make more or less money.

How long will it take to start a plant nursery side hustle?

Generally it takes about 18-24 months to start a plant nursery from scratch. This assumes you start with small, bare root plants and grow them out for 2 full seasons. Some plants can be grown out faster and/or you may also choose to sell some larger plants that take 2-4 years, or more to grow out.

Some ways to generate income faster

• Sell off some of your plants sooner, smaller but for less money. Planting and selling 100 extra plants for $15.00 each in 1 year gets you most of your investment back in a year.
• Learn to root plant cuttings and sell what you don’t need.
• Buy the largest bare root plants you can. Saves you growing time.
• Start now, don’t wait, you can start anytime, Spring, Fall, or Winter.

How much can you make from a Plant Nursery Side Hustle

How much money you earn from your plant nursery side hustle will depend a lot on some simple mathematics. You need to calculate the cost of your plants, potting, soil, containers, fertilizer, and water. You may also hire some occasional labor to help you get more plants started sooner. Your costs will also depend on the types of plants you are growing . Your selling price of plants will be determined by the type of plant you grow and to a degree your local market area. We will try to use some numbers that look more like an average rather than the numbers in our exact area. Prices are higher where we live but so are some of the costs so let’s try to stay with some averages.

Pick 5 to 10 plants to start.

To make money with plants, you need to sell plants people want to buy! The Green Giant Arborvitae is a popular plant almost anywhere. We grow 3 different spruces as well. In our side hustle plant nursery we also have a wide variety of other trees and plants. Let’s start as an example with a simple plant like a Green Giant Arborvitae. You can pick some additional plants and add varieties later.

We know we can buy small bare root plants for $1-2.50 if purchased in quantities of at least 100 plants. Your cost may vary depending on where you buy and how large of plant you purchase. Let’s say we’re going to plant these plants in a $0.60 trade gallon plastic container. Add potting soil mix, a little bit of fertilizer, water and let them grow for two years. The cost of the dirt, the pots and the fertilizer it’s going to be about $1.50 plus the $1.50 plant.  Now we know we have a total cost of $3.00 to plant an Arborvitae. We prefer to plant larger are root plants so we budget $4.00 for costs. Then let it grow.

How much can you sell plants for?

We would estimate the average selling price for a Green Giant Arborvitae that has grown from a small bare root plant to about a 2-3 foot plant will sell for approximately $20-35.00. To compare Walmart sells these for $24.99-39.99. So then, if you subtract the $3.00 of costs you are left with a profit of $17.00 – 27.00 per plant. Not bad!

We could then take this $17.00 profit and divide it into the amount of income you want to make. This will give us the number of plants needed to be grown. For example, if you grew 500 plants you would make an approximate $8,500 net profit. So then, to earn $10,000 you would need to grow about 600 plants (we added about 5% for loss). You of course need to sell them all and get full price for all of them. Don’t worry, that is fairly easy to do for popular plants.

Thus you may wish to grow several different plants to add variety to nursery and attract a few different types of customers. You may wish to read about which plants to grow elsewhere on our website. Next paragraph

Is planting 600 plants per a year a big number?

Well at first, it sounds like a large number for a little plant nursery side hustle. Once you break this down, it really is not an enormous task. You could certainly break your planting down into fall and spring planting or spread over a few weeks. This would reduce the number of plants you work with at any one time. You do need to plant in a short period of time. From experience one person potting up plants can handle 100 to even 300 per day. So, planting 600 plants in a few days can work. You might order 600 plants but request to receive them 100 to 300 at a time. This would break your work up it to something much more manageable. You can also receive plants and temporary heal them in to some beds so that you don’t have to actually pot all of them up at once. 600 plants is very manageable for 1 or 2 people

What is the investment needed for a $10,000 per year plant nursery side hustle?

Your up front costs would be as follows;

• 600 plants at $1.50 each = $900.00
• 600 trade gallon plastic containers at $0.60 = $360.00
• Potting soil mixed by you at $0.50 per plant= $300.00
• Fertilizer, misc costs = $0.40 per plant = $240.00

How much space will your plant nursery side hustle require?

Lets work backwards. You will plant 600 plants in year one another 600 in year two and then start selling in the third year. Lets then say in the worst case you may need to have 600 x 3 = 1,800 plants in your nursery at times. According to the very handy North County Organics Plants per Acre Calculator you could fit about 19,000 plants in trade gallon containers on a full acre of land. Thus you could fit over 10 x 1,800 plants in a full acre. You thus need about 1/10th of an acre or 4,400 sq feet, or a space 60′ x 75′ or 110′ x 40′ or perhaps 2 smaller spaces combined.

This is assuming the plants are at 18″ centers. 18″ spacing is actually a little too wide when plants are younger so you can tighten all our numbers up by 20 to 30%. When your plants are small and in trade gallon pots for the first year you can easily get away with just 10″ x 10″ plant spacing. You could then fit 144 pots per 100 sq.ft. For about 1/2 of your 1,800 plants you need much less space. Using your space sparingly could fit everything in a 50′ by 50′ space just fine. You should also never need to have 1,800 plants in your nursery long as you will start selling them early in your 3rd year.

All that you need to start a plant nursery side hustle can be found in our Backyard Nursery Resources Guide

Total costs = $1,800 | Total sales of 600 plants at $20.00 each (Less a little plant loss) = $11,800
Your final net profit is $10,000.

But it will take two years to realize a profit from your Plant Nursery Side Hustle?

This is true! What can you do to really grow a plant nursery side hustle that makes $10,000 every year? What we did was just wait out the 2 years and keep investing for 2 full years. In this case you would then have to invest $1,800 for 2 years before you are selling and turning over that annual investment each year.

Here is a quick summary of the investment and cash flow of a Plant Nursery Side Hustle

To summarize you would have to sell about 588 plants at $20.00 each to cover $1,800 in costs and net $10,000 per year. The planting, care and selling of the plants will take you 60 to 80 hours of work per year. That works out to about $125.00 per hour or probably a more. We think that’s a pretty nice plant nursery side hustle or retirement income.

See more of our Backyard Nursery articles and videos.

Backyard Nursery Resources
Starting a Plant Nursery
Starting a Backyard Plant Nursery
How to make Money with Plants
Plant Propagation