Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm
and today i want to answer the question of what are the first steps you should
take if you're setting up a nursery a plant
nursery all of your own should you start by
buying a piece of land and setting up a couple of greenhouses
should you then fill them with a bunch of plants or maybe you should start with
a retail end and set up a little shop or store of your own
or you could start with the branding set up a great
nursery name and set up a website and get business cards
and in my view the first steps you should take are much smaller
and much more mundane than those and i'll put up a list on the screen right
now of those that i would recommend you
start with to set up your own plant nursery
and i'll also put time stamps on these so you know where in the video to skip
to if one of these topics appeal to you more than the others
the first step in my opinion is to get your hands on some plants
or plant related product and begin selling them at a smaller scale
now you'll notice when i said that i didn't say that you had to grow the
plants and you certainly don't have to have
a greenhouse full of them what are your other options well you don't if you
don't have to grow them you can look at things like wholesale
growers other wholesale growers in your area or
brokers or you can buy in some bulbs and start them that way
so you don't have to grow these things from beginning to end
and it's important that you begin to test the market now
if you do happen to have some plants of your own if you have a house full of
house plants that you've taken divisions of
if you have some garden plants that you can divide that's a valid way to start
too but the point here is not to wait until you have a giant assortment of
plants and try to grow and fill a whole assortment and
selection of plants you really do need a way to test that
market first so even if it's just a matter
of getting some cuttings and listing them on craigslist or facebook and start
selling them that way or getting some bulbs from a supplier
putting them in some pots in early spring
growing them into color and showing up at your farmer's market in a backyard
gardener table it's as easy as that i mean my first
foray into into growing really was a tray of alpine strawberries that i
grew and i put them on craigslist humble
beginnings but i have it on good authority that one of the biggest
flower growers in ontario started with a crate of bulbs
from holland and one of the biggest growers in california
started with a mom and pop operation growing plants in their backyard and
taking them out and selling them from the back of a truck
so humble beginnings but the first thing is
that you have to get used to trying to sell plants
before you invest a whole lot more into trying to grow them
step number two that i'm going to talk about can sound a little intimidating i
get some questions around this and so i want to talk about it in a
little bit of depth sorry it's going to make the video go long
but it's about regulations now i don't make the rules i just have to follow
them and all i'm encouraging you to do with
this step is to assess your local state and federal laws as they apply to
our trade so that you don't trip over them later
as you grow your business it's true that at early stages as you're
doing it in a small scale there's not that much that applies to
you so if you start a whole bunch of seedlings in your backyard
you end up selling them at a plant sale or farmer's market
you know there's really not that much in terms of regulations that apply to you
if you took some divisions of house plants and you end up selling those
through again facebook facebook or craigslist and
selling them locally to to buyers again there's not that much that applies to
you but again as soon as you start shipping
your plants across state lines now you have some restrictions that are
related to phytosanitary matter so the the risk that you could move a pest
from one jurisdiction to another and in that case you may be dealing with
usda regulations or state regulations around the movements of plants
so those are the kinds of things you have to keep in mind do you need a
business license okay in my case i have a small to medium
sized nursery i don't require a business license
in my area where i live in an unincorporated area
and in canada in under our laws if you do farm gate sales if you sell
off of your own farm you don't require permission of your
municipality to go ahead and do that if you're on agricultural land
but if you're in a city your situation may be different if you
tried to set up a booth or a stand or a front yard nursery
in a city you may have to get a business license for that or there may be zoning
requirements that you have to attend to so that's one area that you may have to
think about a little bit certainly you should expect that any
time that you earn some money through a business like this that you
have reporting requirements related to taxes that would be the same
for any small business so you just have to think about that
part as well in addition to that and the only other group of regulations that i
want to talk about just briefly here is around your right to propagate plants
so just in a nutshell if you grow something from seed you have
the right to propagate that no problem that's called sexual
propagation taking it from a seed if you try to do asexual propagation of
plants so you find something in a garden center
you'd like to sell it you want to divide it or take cuttings
in that case if you're running as a nursery you probably should familiarize
yourself with the laws around asexual propagation patents on
plants and so on again i don't make the rules i'm just
trying hard to follow them and not ruin my reputation in the industry
so in that case i do have a video that talks about the use of patents
in implants and i'll link that one up above so you can have a slightly more
detailed discussion on that but as i say as you move your your business along
just start to keep in mind those things that could apply to you
either at the local state or federal level
about the growing and selling of plants and i'll leave it at that
step number three or at least as i have them is to learn to grow and propagate
plants and a lot of people would have this down
as step number one and that's okay if you want to start here and work
backwards a little bit but ultimately the point is that
eventually you have to get good at growing and propagating plants
and it helps in this case that if you're a bit of a plant geek like
here i'm doing a bit of an experiment on propagating
under lights using water as a way to root or
using soil as a way to root i also obviously do my main propagation out in
the greenhouse but i'm using these humidity domes
as kind of a cool way to experiment like i say it benefits you a little bit if
you like to play with plants so learning how to propagate plants grow
plants well it's a process it's going to take you
some time but it's an important stage to master if you
want to run your own backyard nursery the fourth step i'm going to recommend
here has a lot to do with marketing or more specifically
social media marketing because it is one of those rare areas
in the industry where you are going to have an upper hand versus larger
competitors the reason for that is because in social
media instagram youtube on facebook people connect with others
who have similar interests to theirs and who show off as genuine about that
interest that's kind of hard to do and hard to
display as a larger competitor a big corporate face
now they may have the upper hand when it comes to newspaper advertising
tv advertising radio glossy magazine ads and so on
okay that's fine but i don't think that marketing is really going anywhere
as an individual you can go out on instagram put out some pictures of your
of your of your business and connect with others who share that
passion and that's where it really is at now in my
example i went ahead and i did instagram and i had some success there i found
that the best place for me to connect in a more meaningful way was on youtube
now obviously part of why i'm doing that is because i
love talking about roses i love connecting
with other gardeners about roses but the other part is because i wanted to
promote my business and it's been working you in in recent
days it's been easier for people to get people to show up to my plant
selling events it's been easier to sell online
so this year particularly with with a lot of what was happening with covet and
having to sell curbside at my farm i honestly think it
was my youtube presence that helped me to survive through that
as a business so it the sooner you can establish some kind of
meaningful social media presence the better i
did make a video on time talking about connecting with garden
clubs connecting with social media i will link that above as well if you
want a more in-depth talk on the topic but the main thing is to just get
started in one way or another the fifth thing you should do and it's
not a sexy topic so i won't spend a lot of time on it
but it's keeping records you should have a spreadsheet with your production
numbers what you've put into pots and you should keep some records of how
you've sold this here would represent an early
version of my production records these are just the plant tags that i
used to sell them at the farmer's market and on the back i've made some notes
about how it turned out in this case of course i had my sales by
week and then i also recorded when i had it sold out
same for this one here which was sold a bit earlier in the season and were
ready early but i have noted down here that by week
20 they were in poor condition i'm using botanical
weeks here or just calendar weeks to record it because then
i compare it from year to year so i can plan when i'm
going to have these ready for the next time
so i won't spend too much time on that but i think it's important
that at least at some basic level that you're keeping records
of how much you're producing and how much you're selling
final topic for the video today is securing supplies for your business and
there's no getting around it no matter what size you're trying to run
your business you're going to have to find a place where you're going to get
your soil where you're going to pick up your plastic
where you grab your fertilizer and some of that unfortunately i can't help you
with very specifically i can tell you where
i got it but i can't tell you where to get it locally in your area except
beyond general advice and tips so the soil that i'm using that you see in the
pile back here is based on wood products it's a
composted bark mix mixed with some shredded wood fibers
it's mixed by a local potting soil producer so it's somebody
who custom mixes this based on our local horticulture industry
the problem with that answer is that of course i can't tell you who's
going to be offering a wood-based product in
surrey england it's not something that i can tell you or even whether it's such a
product is available there i can tell you that pete and perlite
based mixes are widely available in north america so
something like sunshine mix pro-mix i think berger
makes a mix so there are suppliers that will offer
those in the compressed bales and deliver them even in
in tall compressed bales to remote locations so that's something that's
possible but wherever you can it's always going
to work out to be more advantageous to get a local supplier
of potting soil you may want to go and check your other local nurseries and see
what they're doing for that while you're there
ask about plastic because some people use smaller sizes
some people use larger sizes i know that my local
blueberry producers they get their plants in and this size and they end up
with a giant stack of them so i'm able to pick these up from blueberry guys
from between 5 and 10 cents a pot which is
a great savings over what i would spend if i got those from
the horticulture supply store speaking of the horticulture supply store
you may have a dedicated horticulture supplier in your area or you may have to
go through something more general like a feed store
agriculture store so unfortunately in these cases i'm not going to be much use
to you in terms of giving you specific
recommendations only that very likely the best piece of advice i
can give you is to talk to other local growers
and try to share some information that way they'll know where they're getting
their soil where they're getting their plastic
where they pick up their fertilizer and they may be able to help you out with
that okay those are that's it for my six
steps to starting your own nursery business i hope you
found it helpful if you have questions i've been through this at least in my
specific area so i may be able to help you out with that
leave those in the comments below the video