Starting a Backyard Plant Nursery

Starting a backyard nursery can be both profitable and enjoyable. Think about it, you can actually live off the land or at least start a profitable plant nursery side hustle. We of course chose to start a backyard plant nursery as a retirement activity we really enjoy. Our intention is to make a partial retirement income from our nursery. As we build up we are literally Growing Our Retirement and our plant nursery retirement business is becoming a meaningful Retirement Investment for us. Many have gone about starting a backyard plant nursery to help with some extra retirement income, pay for college expenses, or make some extra money. In some cases using a large property that you already own, you can become classified as a farm and save on Real Estate taxes.

Planting bare root trees or liners in the fall and spring will keep you busy but in short bursts. You will be busy in Fall and Spring, Potting up plants while they are dormant. Some will look like just little twigs. These plants will not be ready for sale until they have grown for 1-4 years so planning becomes important. Two things we do a lot of is planting and planning! If you want to make money with plants both are essential.

How profitable can starting a backyard nursery be?

The answer lies really in how hard you want to work at it. For very little investment you could learn to propagate plants from your own garden or from a friends, start hundreds of cuttings, scrounge some free pots and be making some money in a few months. Considering you could have at least 100+ plants in a 10’x10’ space it will take most people a long time before they run out of space. If you have a typical lot in a neighborhood you could grow a business that makes $10,000 to 30,000 per year. Here is a fairly basic plant nursery side hustle that earns $10,000 a year. You could do more or less from there. We prefer plant propagation but to really scale your business it is hard to beat just planting bare root trees by the dozens, hundreds, or thousands.

Questions when starting a backyard plant nursery

We go into more detail in all our other articles but your main concerns to start are.

How much space do you have and how much you want to use?
What will you grow? What will sell?
How will you find customers?
What containers to use or will you plant right in the ground?
What type of Potting Soil will you use?
How much do you need to invest?
What tools will you need?
How will you handle watering
What to do about Nursery Plant Tags

How much space is needed to start a backyard nursery?

You really do not need a large property to start potting up plants and selling them. A back patio can be a place to start or part of your backyard on a small lot. Best practice is not to spread your plants out too far, this makes them harder to water and wastes a lot of water. Thus, you can grow 1,200 – 1,400, 10″ plants in 1,000 sq feet of space (20’x50′) or over 2,200 plants if in 8″ pots. We recommenced you also maximize space by growing some of your small plants in tightly spaced beds. Do this before moving them to containers to finish growing them out. Don’t let space hold you back!

Super small small plant nursery ideas.

If you are really challenged for space you can make a nice extra income just rooting plants and selling bare root liners. You could grow thousands of small rooted plants in a really small space. We pay $1.00 to even $5.00 per bare root liner. For just a small nursery we buy and are planting bare root trees and plants by the thousands each year. You could become a supplier of bare root plant stock in a fairly small space. Growing bare root plants or liners is also much easier physically. They are smaller, lighter and you won’t be lugging heavy potted plants around.

What will you grow in your backyard nursery?

More backyard nursery ideas. You may want to grow what you are passionate about. You are however probably better off picking 3 to 5 plants you know will sell before branching off too far. Look in the garden centers, big box stores and on Facebook marketplace to see what others stock as this is what sells. In our area we are always growing Arborvitae such as Green Giant, Leyland Cypress and Schip or Cherry Laurels as they are huge sellers. Thus, we are growing them! We also grow and sell trees and plants we love such as Norway, Blue and White Spruce, Dogwoods, Redbud trees, Japanese Red Maples, and a variety of smaller shrubs. In addition we are building up a stock of perennial plants such as Hostas.

You can sell a mix of plants but to keep your revenue strong, investigate and sell what people want to buy. Look at what the Garden Centers and Big Box stores are selling. You can also get into more exotic plants like Japanese Maples and Fig trees or you can grow any combination. Do try to grow what people want to buy!

Expanding what you sell.

More small plant nursery ideas! Think about what you will sell. Lets say you start with just 5 different plants but want to keep expanding your offering to 25 to 35 different plants. You could just order 100 liners of 25 plants and go at it from year one. That could be done but would represent a large investment. 2,500 plants, pots, dirt and fertilizer would be about a $10,000 investment. We were not at this level until about year 4. Instead start with 500 plants but adding to that by learning to take cuttings and root them. When you first start with cuttings you might attempt 500 cuttings but are only successful with 100. That does represent 100 free plants. When you get better at it, it could become 400-1,000 or more free plants per year.

In year 2 you might order 1,000 plants and now start a few hundred cuttings. To diversify our plant offering we bought dozens of plants at half price as it is possible to build your plant business from big box stores. This got us started with a lot of new plants, growing them out, taking cuttings and even reselling the plants in 6 to 12 months for 2 to 4 times the sale price.

How will you find customers?

Plant people do tend to find plant sellers. Some really like discovering small growers and many will become repeat customers. Holding some driveway plant sales or selling by appointment both advertised on Facebook Marketplace is a good way to start. If you live on a well traveled road you may be able to put out a temporary or permanent sign. You might however not want people just dropping in.

We put all our plants that we want to sell in an area next to our driveway and sell mostly by appointment, on weekends and some evenings. We don’t take people to our larger growing areas as they are all plants we don’t want to sell yet. While we do plan to have some plant sale weekends, this will be limited to 3 to 5 in the spring and 3 to 4 in the fall. Our preference is for people to come by appointment in the evening and on the weekend.

What containers to use or will you plant right in the ground?

You are going to use a lot of containers in your backyard nursery unless you plan to plant right in the ground. We have almost nothing planted in the ground, we are container growers. That said we do have some beds to grow and hold cuttings and bare root plants in.

Our preference is to use the very premium, non-woven, fabric grow bags WITH handles. The sizes we use most are the 1,2,3 and 5 trade gallon size bags. These are currently costing about $0.75-1.20 per bag depending on the size and the “deal” we can find. We also use hundreds of #1 trade gallon plastic pots. These run $0.50 – $0.60 each as of early 2023.

See our Backyard Nursery Resources Guide for more.

A professional approach with quality in mind for your nursery is best.

Our approach when potting up plants is to use the best quality tools, pots, plants and fertilizers. We want to present a professional appearance and product. That said you may be OK looking around for free pots, customers probably don’t mind. Best to probably to steer clear of any used pots with branding or old tags on them.

What Potting Soil will you use?

A very important ingredient to your success will be deciding on the potting soil you will use. See our article on: Potting Soil

Tools needed when starting a backyard plant nursery.

Assuming you have plants to sell and containers to put them in, you will need some tools.

We recommend you buy better quality tools for the best results. Here is a starter list of tools but do look at our Backyard Nursery Resources Guide for even more information.

A wheel barrow for moving, soil materials, plants, pots etc. We had one of these and you probably do too.
Good rounded point and square shovels.
Pruning sheers – You may want several of these plus a sheath to keep in on you belt at all times.
Some rugged scissors or shears. We are almost always pruning plants and roots.
A garden knife and a really sharp utility knife are handy when dividing plants and digging up small plants.
A couple good size grain scoops with a flat bottom as ideal for filling pots and trays.
You may also want a 6 foot long, mostly plastic table for potting. Nothing elaborate and something you can hose off. We use a couple of extra strong saw horses, and sheet of plywood with several 2″x4″‘s under it for strength.

That is about all you need when starting a backyard nursery that can grow hundreds or thousands of plants per year. Follow our website Growing Our Retirement for many more and a growing collection of Backyard Plant Nursery Tips for Success.

Maybe you have more concerns, lets talk about what is holding you back from starting a plant nursery.

Scaling up your backyard nursery with bigger tools!

We already had a lot of property to maintain and some tools that help us maintain it. Now we also use them in running the nursery. We show them to give you some small plant nursery ideas to think about. Some of them are really handy and they are:

A tractor with a bucket loader – great for moving potting soil and mixing it. We can dump our potting soil right on our potting table – about enough at one time to pot up 25 3 gallon plants.
ATV or 2 Seater ATV – We use our SxS ATV as it has a dumping bed on it to move plants when we are potting up plants and moving them to our growing area. The bed holds 24 plants in 3 gallon containers or around 40 in a 1 gallon pot. So handy!
Large farm wagon or trailer. We can move 200 plants on our 16′ long farm wagon and can pull it with our SxS ATV or tractor. We also have a 12′ road trailer. These are very handy when bringing plants up to our selling area. We don’t even have to take plants off them. If plants don’t sell we take them right back to the growing area.