Number one: Don't cut down your trees.
Whatever the logger is going to give you is not worth what you can get from the medicinals
underneath, especially on the north-facing side.
So a typical cove, with a stream down the middle, one quarter of that land in that cove
is suitable for ginseng.
So there's certain places where, when you plant ginseng it's not a hardship to get it
to grow because that's where it likes and you just have to find that space that it likes
and then it will just grow like it normally does.
An example of how humans can help the ginseng plant is that a plant by itself will produce
a one percent rate of progeny and part of that's because it has to go through an 18
month cycle and in the warm part of that cycle it tends to dry out and die.
So if you put it in stratification which is from fall to fall and then you plant it in
the fall where it goes over the winter, the germination factor is in like the 80s and
90s.
Even if you were to come across a plant in the forest and you were to take out the pulp
and put in the seed 2 centimeters into the ground, at it's desired distance, it still
has 18 months to come up and the chances of it growing even if you put it into the ground
is only about 16 percent.
So stratification is the way that we as human beings can help this plant.
I think it's really important to have a business plan.
If you don't know where you're going to sell and you don't know how many you're going to
sell, then you really shouldn't get into this.
Anybody can grow a plant.
Anybody can put it into a pot but being able to sell that plant in the pot is the trick
and that's called marketing, and to help you along in that way, you really need a business
plan to know all of the costs that are associated with a business.
First of all, the amount of money to come in is small, but you're always going to have
almost double value by selling a plant versus selling a root.
If you take that root and you put it into a process to create a new product out of it,
then you can charge that extra price that would be equal to the plant or sometimes even
greater.
We sell a lot through the internet.
A lot of it is finished products.
You know dried roots we can sell all year round, capsules we can sell all year round.
So those kinds of things that are not as time constrained as plants in the spring or roots
and seeds in the fall.
It gives you a little more of a business opportunity to spread out through the year at least into
three seasons.
I prefer, I actually like the lifestyle where in the winter time everybody goes to sleep
and the farmer can go off traveling and not have to work.
Number one, people want to get rid of black plastic pots.
They don't want to put them in the landfill.
A very small advertisement will usually - free - will get you lots of pots.
Having compost, they put leaves on the sides of the road in no man's land every fall that
you could take and help the city so that they don't have to pick it up by creating compost.
So you're going to get dirt, good forest dirt out of leaves and you got the pots.
Then you have a plant rescue where you can get plants free by getting in front of the
bulldozer and getting stuff done.
And then you just sit at a farmer's market on a Saturday...of course Asheville is wonderful
in that it has like 28 farmer's markets in our area where you can sit and sell these
plants and make a living, you know.
After a while you become known for the plants and the trees and people will come to you
and it takes a while to do that, but as a business, it doesn't take a lot of money and
number two, it's a great lifestyle because you're with plants.
They don't talk back to you like people do.