Start a plant business for profit and enjoyment.
Starting a plant business and operating it can be both a source of income and great enjoyment. Doing what you love and making a good living from it is nothing short of a dream for many people. Learning to make money with plants and understanding how you love of plants can become a profitable plant nursery side hustle is the place to start. We think for us a plant nursery is the ultimate retirement business. Maybe it could be for you too.
We will take you through several aspects of starting a plant nursery and encourage you to read through our other articles.
What type of plant business will you start?
There are many types of backyard nursery focuses. The first decision you should consider is if you want to be a grower, a retail reseller or maybe a combination of both.
Plant nursery growers or finish growers fit into categories such as:
- Those who grow plants from seeds and bulbs. They may sell small plants to other growers or full grow plants out to a more mature size. They may also grow flowers.
- Those who start liners or seedlings from seeds or cuttings. These growers often only sell wholesale to other growers.
- Finish growers who buy liners and growth them out to a larger and more salable size.
- There are also growers who grow trees for long periods of time for Christmas Trees or even timber or firewood.
Many of the above may also make some or all of their sales by direct to consumers selling.
Some of the categories of retailing or selling directly to consumers are:
- Owning and operating a garden center or plant store.
- Operating a plant nursery that sells plants that they grow themselves or that they only resell.
- Selling to consumers by mail, catalog or e-commerce.
- Selling plants at various plant sales, markets or even from the back of a truck.
- Selling locally by using social media classified ads either from occasional plant sales, by appointment or even by delivery only.
Those who sell directly to consumers may or may not grow their own plants. Many do not grow at all but simply buy wholesale and mark up the prices to consumers. We will talk mostly about those who grow and then sell what they grow. Running a strictly retail plant sales operation is really a different business although there are many overlapping areas.
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The backyard nursery we started
We had several goals in mind for our plant nursery model. We considered our positive attributes and also our limitations.
To our favor we had:
- Lots of space – our larger property could hold more plants than we could ever hope to manage and grow.
- Well located in an area with good retail trade right to consumers.
- Converting our property to an agricultural use offered some potential real estate tax reductions.
- We already had or could buy some useful equipment that we could dedicate to the plant nursery.
- Good access to potting soil ingredients, wholesale plants and liners and access to a good water supply.
- We had a strong preference for a “Home Based” business.
Some of our challenges to starting a plant business
- About a 2 year investment in liners, containers, potting soil, equipment and time before seeing much revenue.
- Since working full-time and somewhat demanding jobs our time was limited.
- While knowing how to grow plants we were not sure what plants would sell. This is always a challenge but some research online and visiting local garden centers helped greatly.
When to start a plant business
The when is now, start small with small investments in plants and just get started. Testing and experimenting is important to growing your knowledge. There is never a substitute for hands on experience. If you, like us, plan to start a nursery for some retirement income you should start a business before you retire so you can have it running well when you need it.
Start writing an initial plan for your plant nursery. List what you will grow, the costs, the expected sale prices and how long it will take you to grow the plants out. This type of plan should evolve as you change your plant growing mix, learn and especially as you expand. We went from growing 3-500 plants a year to 3-4,000. Keeping records becomes important!
We like keeping everything in a multi-tab spreadsheet. You can keep a list of growers and what they are good at. Keeping a list of the plants you want to order and then what you actually plant is important. In that same sheet listing the planting date, costs of containers and expected selling price is the key to keeping a good history. You should also make a column for when you plant to sell your plants so you can project sales revenue and profits. You can also add notes.
Prepare a plant nursery growing area.
If you are a grower or finish grower you have to start at least an initial area to work and plant in. If you plan to be more of a seed grower or cutting propagator you may need to set up some bins or beds.
When starting a plant nursery where you mostly grow in containers you will need a gravel area or space covered in fabric weed cloth. You may also need to fence out an area to keep deer and other animals out of your growing area. Likewise if you are planting in the ground you may need to fence, create beds or even clear some area for growing.
Buying plants for your plant business
If you are growing out plants as a finish grower, growing from seed, planting plugs you need to buy something to start with. This could be seeds, plugs or liners. Small plants are often called liners as they are planted out in a growing area in lines to grow. The names seedlings, transplants, and liners are used almost interchangeably.
Plugs are typically plants grown in containers that have small growing “cells” that measure about 2”x2”. These are often sold in minimum quantities of such as 24, 48 or 72.
Buying seeds is not something we have done but it will be a similar process to buying a live plant. Searching for suppliers, placing orders and getting your seeds planted.
Start a plant business – What and where is right for you?
When you are starting a backyard plant nursery, you can work with almost any situation. You might even live in an apartment and just have a small space outside to grow plants or even a balcony or patio. Starting a nursery is about picking some plants that will sell. Then learn to propagate them, or buy them and grow them out to a size that can be sold. The goal is to learn to make money with plants. You can test these concepts anywhere.
Even a small yard can be a good location when starting a plant business.
Ideally, you will have at least a small yard or area to work with. You will of course need the right amount of sun and an available water source for your plants to grow. If all you have is shade it would then be wise to grow plants that like the shade. If you only have full sun , you most certainly will want to grow plants that do well in the full sun. You might also need to build a small shade house but these can be very simple and inexpensive. For most people, their water source will just be their hose outside, which should be adequate to water many many plants. We happen to have a large pond and can water with a small pump from the pond.
Starting a plant business in a residential neighborhood home?
Starting a small nursery in the backyard of your neighborhood home can be an ideal location for a plant nursery. Assuming you have some space that you can devote to plant growing you should be fine for a while. If you have a nice driveway in the front that faces the road this might actually be an ideal place to hold a few plant sales each year. You don’t necessarily want a lot of people walking around your backyard , walking through all your plants,especially those you are not ready to sell yet.
When we started our nursery, we decided we would have an area for growing plants and an area for selling plants. We move all of our plants that we want to sell to our selling area. The plants will generally remain there until they are sold. We do not want to bring them back-and-forth. If anything we are restocking plants in the selling area after good plant selling days.
Is your particular property a good location for a nursery?
Take a good look at your property to determine what you have available that might work to your advantage. You may have some good attributes that might even enhance your nursery business. We had no lack of space when we started but we did have a fair amount of shade. We live in a more affluent area which is good for plant selling! Our location is on a busy road so we knew we could get some customers to come to our sales.
Many people with small nurseries only sell by appointment and will meet with customers only on evenings and weekends. This is really great as you really don’t want to start a retail garden center business. You don’t have to keep regular hours to grow some plants and sell them.
Make your property into a plant nursery
We did spend some time preparing our selling area to receive customers and made sure we had adequate room for cars. Cleaning up some items in the area like removing some old firewood and brush and putting some weed mat down. While we are at any one time, growing a lot of plants, we found it was not necessary to put out enormous amounts of plants at all times. Our customers can only see a small portion of all of our plants.
We found early on that watering was going to be something that took some extra effort on our part. We invested in some hoses and some sprinkler heads only to find that it was not enough to water all our plants in the time we had available. Since we have a pond, we are now working on a supplemental system so we can water plants from a small pump from our pond. In addition to our regular well water source, which also serves the house, the pond pump will be perfect.
We did have to upgrade our well pump. It is not wise to just continuously water for hours and hours with a well pump. We thus give the pump a rest by watering for 60-90 minutes in a section, turning off the water and giving the pump half hour to one hour breaks. With the pump from the pond, we will be able to alternate between the house well pump and the pond pump to water continuously. This is an area where upgrades are probably in our future.
What else makes for a good location for starting a home-based nursery?
You may take it upon yourself and if you have the space, you might improve your selling area to include some nice permanent shrubs or perhaps some pea gravel walkways. Adding a small pond with a fountain is very nice but possibly overkill for most operations. You want to make some racks to display plants however just putting them on your driveway at a good price is perfect. We have a couple of trailers we move and display plants on, works great and easy to refill from our growing area .We also like the idea of using some pallets to make some racks for our plants, this is on the to do list.
Check on Local zoning before you start a plant business
Depending on how many plants you may sell, how many plant sales per year you may have and exactly how much traffic you may generate to your nursery and may have difficulty with your property zoning. Typically residential zoning does not allow for an active commercial business to operate. However, if you’re having just a few plant sales in the spring and selling some plants by appointment it is unlikely you will have a zoning problem. With just a few customers, you may not bring much attention to yourself. You might consider giving your neighbors some free plants, wink!
If this does become a problem for you, you might be able to seek a business license to do a limited amount of business from your home. Some Municipalities allow for this light impact type of activity. You might also be on a piece of commercial property. Therefore, you would have no trouble operating a business however, you may need to file or request permission from your town for the specific views of a nursery on your property.
A farm is a good location for a backyard nursery.
For people with larger pieces of property, generally five or six or more acres you may be able to become classified as a farm or agricultural use. This property could also include your home. However, if you are actively growing plants you might be able to have part of your property designated as an agricultural use. Particular to New Jersey and perhaps some other states a property of six or more acres can be designated for agricultural use. The 1st acre immediately surrounding the house or dwelling would be considered your residence. If you have five or more acres in addition to this acre, it could be designated for farm use. We would recommend you hire someone who does this type of work in order to qualify initially as a farm or agricultural use.
In New Jersey this process took a hired expert and a two-year qualifying period in order to be re-classified as an agricultural use. To get an idea of what it takes, here are the guidelines in New Jersey. The benefit was the property was also reassessed for taxes as a residence and a farm. For us it meant 1 acre of home dwelling and residential at regular tax rates and 8 acres for agriculture and wood lot management. New Jersey and I am sure most states require that you actually do what you say you are going to do. So, we produce firewood and grow plants.
The process of becoming a farm
Our property had to be inspected and a nursery license obtained from the state. The property is actively monitored to see that we are doing. The reality for us is we ended up doing far more than is required. We are absolutely managing the woodland forest in addition to operating an ever expanding plant growing operation. Between forested land and open land we are using almost all our 11 acres to operate as an agricultural farm /woodlot management property.
Along with farm or agricultural classification comes the ability to sell your products, receive customers, and conduct business on your property. If this is the case for you, you just need to prepare your plan, and actually do what you say you’re planning to do. Thus a farm is the perfect location for a plant nursery. If you have one, great and if not this is something you may want to work towards.
Starting a plant business on a farm is ideal
Owning some land was always a dream for us and we do love our place. We like selling plants from more of a farm then a garden center type atmosphere. Having multiple activities all together is great. We have the nursery, a small firewood business, a vegetable garden, and someday a small Christmas tree plot. People also like buying from a farm, especially when they know we sell what we grow. So, for us a farm is our ideal location for a plant nursery.
Open in a commercial plant nursery location
There may also be some readers who intend on opening a regular commercial operation on a commercially zoned property. For you, the process would be different in that you may need zoning approval and some type of formal site plan. Requirements might include a business license and maybe conforming to some type of building codes. That may include things like adding a building with public restrooms.
Whatever your plans are make sure you do not run into trouble with your local municipalities or zoning departments. If you intend on staying very small, growing or just a small number of plants per year, you may need to do nothing. As you gain confidence and begin to enjoy, making extra money, your plans might grow. We certainly wish you the best and know that once you get started. You are going to have a difficult time keeping your nursery small!
We can’t cover all the possibilities of starting a plant business.
As we have tried to cover starting a plant nursery can take many directions with many different focuses. You could grow small or large plants, exotic or more common. Some people very successfully just start small plants and others grow giant timber trees. Start assessing your strengths and make a plan to grow something suitable for you.
See our discussion for more about Starting a Backyard Plant Nursery if you have some space and a desire to work from your home. If you are like us at, Growing Our Retirement you will start a backyard nursery to make some extra income in retirement.
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