Hey again, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm
And today I want to take you through one of the most basic questions of how to start your own plant business or backyard
Nursery, and that's the question of what plants - what crops should you try to grow to make a profit for your business?
I'm inserting some clip snaps for some of my previous videos on how to sell plants and you can see that I've grown a wide
Variety of plants in these videos that I would consider rare or uncommon or unusual in the trade
That's a strategic decision that I came to in my market here
I'm going to tell you how I came to that decision, but in part it is influenced
all of my plant decisions are influenced by my
local circumstances
so I grow plants in a
Northern temperate mild climate and I'm close to an urban center which has a large population to buy my plants
So that's influenced. I'm going to take you step-by-step through how I made these crop planning decisions. I am going to start with a diagram
I might even sneak a graph in there somewhere, but don't worry. I'll make it really clear with examples from my own farm
Let's begin with a horizontal line. We'll label this line difficulty
You can categorize any plant you consider growing along this line from left to right
Left being easy and right being hard. Those that are the fastest easiest
Longest lasting and trouble-free are on the far left an example from here would be marigolds
They're quick and consistent from seed
they have long lasting flowers and they're relatively pest free as
You move along the line to the right you can place the plants that are more difficult
slower harder to find or tough to keep in good condition an example could be something like
Himalayan blue poppy which requires quite particular growing conditions to grow well
Along this horizontal line all other things being equal. I'm sure you choose easy over difficult
That just makes sense. Right? I'd like to add a second line
Now this one vertical we'll label this one line demand along this line
You'd categorize the plants you'd consider from low demand on the bottom to high demand and sought-after at the top
For example at the bottom end of this line might be something like oh say American pokeweed
Not a lot of people know what it is
It's not impressive a pot has a terrible marketing name and it has poisonous berries to boot very few
People will come looking for this plant on the top end think of something like fall mums
Customers instantly recognize it they buy it every year because it's colorful at the time of year when everybody wants color
With both lines in place now all other things being equal. I'm sure you choose plants that are easy to grow and
In high demand, so they'll be easy to sell to it makes sense
In fact, it makes so much sense that this is exactly what everyone chooses to grow
I'm gonna highlight the upper left quadrant of this graph and name it the mass market zone in this area
You'll find the easiest plants to grow and sell and because of this the large growers serve this market really well
The plants in this zone could also be called easy to find
The boundary on the right is where the plants become too difficult or specialized for most growers
So they're not widely grown and the boundary on the bottom is where demand is not high enough to grow crops and large quantities
So it's not worth the risk for a large grower to produce them
One more note on the mass market zone because the plants are easy to find and there's lots of competition
The plants in this zone are relatively inexpensive. In fact at the top left
these are the plants that are grown by the millions by large growers and
Sold with the very little markup as you move to the right into plants that are more difficult or slower to produce
The price increases to what you typically find in your dedicated garden centers
This zone may look attractive but as a smaller grower, it's not for you
Growing and selling easy to find plants will leave you competing on price and because your plants are pretty standard
You'll struggle to draw the interest of your customers
I'm
highlighting a zone on the graph right now, and I'm going to call this one the specialist zone as a
Smaller grower. This is where I'm gonna spend my efforts finding plants in this area. The plants are not easy to find
There's not too much price competition so you can charge a little more and your customers will appreciate seeing things. They can't find elsewhere
Now I'll talk about some specific strategies and add some examples from my own market
Strategy number one choose plants that are dead easy to grow but a little lower in demand from the area. I'm highlighting here an
Example from my market would be calendula. These are super easy to start from seed perform
Well in the cool season
But for whatever reason they're not as well-known or widely offered as many other annuals where I live on the graph
I might plot them right here in the wide part of the specialist zone just below the mass market
Also in this general area would eat most of the roses that make up the core of my business
They're not much harder to grow than mass-market roses, but they're not as well known by the buying public
some are once blooming old garden roses like
Madame Hardy which is lovely in its own right but compared to modern landscape roses
It's only sought after by a smaller group of rose, connoisseurs
Also in this group have a look at the lesser-known herbs fruits vegetables and perennials
Which may not be all that hard to grow but just take a little more marketing effort because customers don't know about them
I grow a little fruit called Cape gooseberry, which is very easy to grow from seed
But unusual enough that large garden centres don't usually bother with them onda strategy
Number two now choose plants that are high in demand, but so difficult or specialized to grow that most nurseries won't produce them
I indicate them in this zone here. My first example will be bonsai
They're well known and gardeners love them. But they take a very skilled grower lots of hand labor and quite a long time to produce
Another example is in my area palms and banana plants are not fully Hardy
Many gardeners here are envious of that tropical look and would love to have something like that in their garden
Growers of hardy palms banana plants can charge quite a lot for large specimens, but it takes special growing conditions to overwinter them
Strategy number three is to surf the trends even within plants in the mass market
There can be varieties with interesting foliage new colors or novel bloom forms
And if you're sharp enough to get there faster than the big nurseries there can be a good opportunity for you. Think of trendy houseplants
Pilea peperomioides became a hot sought after plant a few years back because of Instagram and Pinterest
If you jumped on that trend early you'd have done
well
It's not hard to grow really and the demand was there just don't arrive late to the party
Once they show up at Walmart or Home Depot
It's time to get out if you keep a sharp eye on the seed catalogs
You can also find novel variations on popper popular annuals
zinnia with frosted tips for instance or a phlox with an outrageous shape and color and
Finally strategy number four is to look for gaps in what the big guys are offering
This applies particularly to those small growers who live in areas away from large cities where?
it's quite possible that your local hardware store or your grocery is your only local source of plants a
Quick comparison between what's available locally and was offered in large urban centers could identify some real opportunities for the small grower?
One more quick point is that the mass market offering expands in the spring and contracts again quickly after the peak of the season
One local opportunity. I saw based on this was basil the large stores only offered early when demand is at its peak
basil is kind of a funny plant in that it's easy to start from seed but difficult to keep in good condition for
Very long and pots in the peak season
I
Might plot it here on the graph but off-peak
It moves right back into my zone because the big guys no longer see it is worthwhile
Ok, let's say you've selected your crops you've grown them to size you're ready to take them to market
There's one more process you need to put in place to make sure that your planning doesn't go sideways and that's the step of market
Feedback now at first when you're only growing a few crops, it may be very easy to tell what's done
well
And what's done poorly you'll be able to know by which trays are full at the end of the day and which trays are empty
But as you add crops to your assortment and use expand your seasons, you're selling at multiple events. It's important to incorporate
Record-keeping into your into your business and record-keeping is not my favorite thing
It takes time that I could be spending growing plants propagating
but if you
Set up the most basic level of record-keeping just writing on the back of a plant tag
How many you sold for a day are keeping a small journal?
That will help you with the next step which is planning your crops for the following year
By incorporating some of the ones that have done well this year and then adding some new more experimental crops to your lineup
This is my seed crop plan for 2020 mind you this does not include anything that I'm doing from cuttings
only what I'm doing from seed and
The software I'm using here is Google sheets, which is just a free piece of software through the Google homepage through my Google account
So I'm not even paying for the software here
Easy way to keep track of what I'm doing
It's a spreadsheet that it goes alphabetically by the botanical name of the plants that I grew and that I grew last year
So these are the amounts that I did and you'll notice that these are all in
multiples of 18 and
that's because I do them in full trays of 18 when I produce a
Plant, and then I've kept track of how many I sold in 2019 and then I've used those numbers to come up with a plan
For how many I want to grow in 2020. So as an example here
Here's a plant. I tried out: Blue Pimpernel. I
Grew 18 just as a trial. I only sold four
It was just no great interest from my customers and I've decided I don't want to grow them again this year
So I've dropped that from my assortment
Meanwhile, if you look at some of these other ones like for instance borage, which shouldn't seem like such a fringe crop
But I found that they don't grow it often in the garden centers. So I've grown borage
I did 18 as a quick test sold all 18 sold them quickly felt there's plenty of potential to go up. So I
Slotted them in for 36 another one that I dropped this year. I thought it looked really good was Cassia marilandica
I got the seeds I started those up. I
Mean 36 of them, so I thought I could sell a fair amount
I ended up only selling nine and so I've dropped that for this coming year and up
Here this I'll see if I cough. Olia Las Vegas is something I've seen in a seed catalog
And fig hollyhock, it's nice and colorful
it won't be colorful in the pot the first year, but I think the picture tag will show well and
Apparently this variety is more resistant to rust than other varieties of Hollyhock. So that's a selling point
So it's a new item that I'm adding this year
one thing that's important to note is that with these items that I'm dropping are the items that I've that I've tried and failed that
This is the only way you're going to know everything can look good to me in a seed catalog and I can assume that
It will also be attractive to my customer, but sometimes it doesn't show well in a pot
sometimes it just doesn't appeal to them the way I thought it would or that it appeals to me and
Going back to the graph that I showed you these are ones that appear in this outer zone
but below outside of the mass-market zone outside of the specialist zone this whole area here are
Plants that after you've tried them out you realize that they're probably not worth the effort of growing
unless you are truly a long-term specialist nursery and have the time to sit on the plants for a while and really
Sell them and really market them to your customers but on a casual basis or a small nursery basis like mine
Where you're just going to the farmers market or plant selling events. It doesn't make sense
And the real tripping area is over here on the far left where the plants are
super easy to grow the things that grow quickly and easily from seed or quickly and easily from cuttings because
They can be very tempting to propagate those in large
Quantities and then you get stuck with them when they don't sell I made a whole other video on that topic with which is called
What free plants really cost your your plant nursery? So I'll link that one up above here
That's everything I have for today on choosing crops choosing plants for your backyard
Nursery or plant business and thank you so much for watching
I'll just remind you that if you have any questions on the nursery business at all, maybe drop those in the comments below
That's kind of what I'm here for