Retirement Side Hustles and add-on’s for your Plant Nursery.
Great retirement side hustles that compliment your plant nursery business. When you’re running a small plant nursery side hustle and become fully retired several opportunities present themselves that are excellent go-along to your small nursery. You have some space, time, perhaps some machinery and some expertise. We are always trying new things and just a few side hustles we have thought of or have tried are.
- Cutting, splitting and selling firewood
- Heat your home with wood to save money
- Doing small landscape projects for customers
- Offering to deliver your plants for a fee
- Planting the plants that you for a fee
- Rent out your property to campers.
- Renting out some of your equipment
- Growing Christmas Trees
- And of course Starting a backyard plant nursery
Cutting, splitting and selling firewood
Our main plant nursery side hustle is our firewood side hustle, cutting, splitting and selling firewood. We have a large amount of trees growing on our property of which each year needs to be thinned of deadwood and unwanted trees. It is said each acre of heavily wooded land will yield about one cord of firewood per year. In addition, many tree services will drop off logs they have from local jobs. They will drop them right on your property for free or for a small fee or tip. We live in a heavily, wooded part of our state and firewood tends to be rather abundant. And even watching on Facebook marketplace you will find many people giving away logs or cut up rounds from trees for free, you just need to pick them up.
We don’t choose to deliver firewood. Thus we have some stands on our property that people can come to and load up their own cut and split firewood. Will load up a bunch of racks the winter before we plan to sell it and make some large stacks on wooden pallets so that we have enough wood for the entire winter. We don’t sell a lot of wood, but it is an extra income and we have to keep cutting it anyway.
Heat your home with wood
Not one of the cash producing retirement side hustles but will save you plenty. We use wood as a supplemental heat source for our home thus reducing some of our costs for the winter. In retirement, we have the time to do this and saving expenses in retirement is as good as income. Worth mentioning too that cutting and splitting firewood is great exercise. Skip the gym and start heating with firewood.
Your Retirement Side Hustle might include doing some work for neighbors. 
Because we run a small plant nursery and have a large piece of property, we also have some equipment. Equipment is needed to maintain our property and run the nursery. Thus, we have accumulated a large assortment of tractors, wagons, a backhoe, wood chipper, chainsaws, log splitter, rototiller, fence post digger, a trailer, truck and more.. We have a handful of people located less than 2 miles from our home that we will sometimes do work for, for payment or trade. This is a great way to defer or offset the cost of something like a $30,000 to $40,000 tractor. We can do smaller jobs the bigger contractors don’t want to bother with.
Some jobs need a few pieces of equipment but if we keep them close to home this isn’t much of a problem. Jobs we can do are land clearing, leveling, digging holes or trenches, rototilleing a garden, taking down trees, moving things, landscaping and so on.
An important note, you need to consider the risks of doing work for others. Carrying insurance is something you really must do and buying an annual policy used to be cost prohibitive. In our current age you ca buy liability insurance by the day or job. One such insurance carrier is BiBerk who offers very flexible options for people doing small projects.
Value-add Retirement Side Hustles for your Plant Nursery
We offer to plant some of what we grow at a customer’s homes for an additional fee. While we don’t always have time to do this sometimes we can. There are also some slower times when this is possible and the extra income is very useful. We do have a post hole auger attachment for our tractor so the ideal project is one where someone needs 50+ small trees planted and we can just come and auger all the holes. Then do the planting and almost double the value we receive from the plants. 100 small trees at $30.00 plus $20.00 each to plant is a nice $5,000 income. Likewise offering delivery (If you can do it) might help you with some larger bulk sales. Instead of discounting you could offer free delivery. In some case you can easily charge for your time and vehicle costs.
Campsite Retirement Side Hustles.
Have extra space in your home or on your property? A great retirement side hustle is renting out your extra space.The kids have moved out and you have a nice property! Having some extra property or a room in your house while being at home most of the time might create some opportunities you have not thought of.
If you have some secluded or scenic space, you could choose to join an organization like Tentrr and create a campsite that can be rented out. You can offer your beautiful place for a night during the months when the weather is nice. While this income may be seasonal and not always steady there’s nothing wrong with getting 20 to 50 nights at a hundred dollars or more per night from your property. Tentrr provides all the infrastructure you need and provides you the liability insurance that you should carry to undergo this type of activity.
Rent out your camper, RV or equipment
Likewise, since you have some extra space, you might consider owning an RV or camper that you could also rent out by the day. Several online exchanges exist to help you do this, and again provide the insurance coverage that you should be carrier. And perhaps you would like to own a camper but aren’t able to use it more than a week or two per year. If someone else is paying you to also use it and covers most of the cost of the camper you can really own it for free. Thus no need to feel guilty about not using it too often. Along the same lines, there are many people who own several campers. Some make a real side hustle business out of renting.
You may also consider renting some of your equipment to people such as your log splitter, tractor or cargo trailer.
Could you rent your house out with AirBnB?
Renting a portion of you home or all of it through AirBnb makes a lot of sense for many people. If you have a larger house, cottage, or loft and don’t mind people staying in your house you could make some extra income. Likewise you could also rent out your entire house for a week or a couple months and go travel. Likely you will receive more for your house than you will spend renting another. Give it some thought and look into this idea.
More and even more Retirement Side Hustles
And there are lots of other add-on businesses, and related retirement side hustles you might be able add to your small plant nursery business. You might also just start one of the ones mentioned and skip starting a plant nursery. Some much time in retirement! In addition to selling firewood, many people sell, cut flowers, vegetables, fruits, nuts, honey, and other assorted agricultural related products.
If you have the space, you might also consider growing Christmas trees . This is a long-term endeavor whereby trees may take as many as 10 years to grow. However, if you have the space and believe you have a market, this is certainly something that can become an additional source of income. Depending on your skills and resources you might even offer various landscaping services, such as designs and installations. Even on a limited basis or maybe in a specialty area like aquascaping you could increase your income by helping others make their properties more beautiful.