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Herbs

Herbs are excellent profit-makers for the roadside stand or to sell directly from your greenhouse from flats or pots, from the hotbed, as packets of seed, or dried in bunches. Among the many varieties you can sell are anise, sage, thyme, caraway, chives, dill, lavender, mint, and tarragon. Sow in flats of light soil. Give good light, a temperature of 60 to 70 degrees, and within a few weeks seedlings will be ready to be transplanted into individual 2-inch pots, from which you may be able to sell them directly. If not, shift into 4-inch pots as growth dictates.

A friend of mine plants several seeds to a cottage-cheese container. When the plants are about 2 inches high, she sells them to a chain grocery store. Here they are placed among the fresh vegetables and sold at 39 cents a pot out of which she receives 20 cents. Herbs can also be transplanted to the garden, grown to sizable stock, clipped, and dried for selling. It is a good idea to slip a tag on each bunch, giving its name and some of its uses.

Hosta

The Plantain Lily (Hosta) is much in demand as a shade plant for the outdoor garden.

A gardener in this section grows 5,000 a year for one of the country’s leading mail-order nurseries. As this man’s place is too sunny for the hostas, he has had lath houses placed in his garden. Here the hostas grow until August when they are dug and shipped to the nursery. There is a real need for more wholesale hosta growers. You can purchase seeds of some varieties; others will have to be started through plant divisions. Plant the seeds any time, with culture as for daylilies. Plant the divisions in March; they grow in average greenhouse soil. Hostas are well suited to the cool or unheated greenhouse.

When warm weather sets in, they can be transferred to the lath house or direct to a shady part of the garden.

Dahlias

The popularity of the dahlia increases every year, and propagating the rare sorts via cuttings can be very profitable. Propagating begins in February, hence northern growers who handle only dahlias do not have to heat their greenhouses during the early and coldest part of the winter. Sprouted cuttings are removed from the summer-stored tubers and placed in flats of sand. Temperature is kept at 65 to 70 degrees. The cuttings root within a month and are potted into 4-inch pots of good loam. They are sold directly in these pots and bring from 1 to 5 dollars per pot, or they can be transplanted to the garden where the tubers multiply, bringing still more profit to the grower.

When the weather is sufficiently warm, it is time to plant the tubers and started plants in the garden. Our northern growing season is not long enough to ripen most garden-grown dahlia seeds. Accordingly, growers wishing to raise them this way order seeds grown in warmer parts of the country. Seeds are planted in flats or pots of light loam. They can be sold as potted seedlings or planted directly into the garden to mature. Some will flower the first year; others will not bloom until the second.

There are some strains of dahlias on the market, such as the Unwin’s, mostly single types, which flower within 4 to 6 months after seed planting. If you want to sell these as potted flowering plants, start the seeds in December in order to have well developed dahlias for spring markets. These plants usually retail for about 59 to 79 cents per pot. An acquaintance who starts these plants in his small greenhouse and later sells them in his own roadside market retails about 500 of them each season.

An attendant at our City Park chrysanthemum show one year told me he could easily have sold 5,000 peppers and Jerusalem cherries, the plants used for accent among the chrysanthemums. Then he added, “I didn’t even know of a nearby greenhouse where I could send people to buy them.”

Pepper plants with their fruit in all stages of ripening-white, purple, green and red-and Jerusalem cherries with bright, orange-red fruits, make a most attractive gift for the holidays. And they are so easy to grow.

To get your start on these plants, purchase seed. In some lists you may find Jerusalem cherry listed botanically under Solarium capsicum, and the ornamental peppers under Capsicum fru-tescens. Seeds should be planted in flats of light loam and then given full sun. As soon as seedlings have 4 leaves (usually about 4 to 6 weeks after planting), prick them out into 3-inch pots of average soil. As they mature, shift them into 4- and then 6-inch pots. They fruit and flower about 6 months after the sowing of seed.

These two are ideal for the unheated greenhouse. Started in May, plants are ready for sale in late October and early November. A midwestern greenhouse gardener makes several hundred dollars each year from sales of these plants-all grown in an unheated greenhouse. She wholesales the plants to the dime stores for 50 cents each; and the stores retail them for 98 cents.

If you plan on doing your own hybridizing, it is best to purchase a few of the best varietiesthose awarded the Stout Medal or those remaining consistently high on the Popularity Poll listing. Catalogs frequently list both of these. Seed of the wonderful pink and melon-colored daylilies is becoming easier to obtain. You can get information on award winners-and about daylilies in general-by joining The American Hemero-callis Society, 416 Arter Avenue, Topeka, Kansas. The Society publishes three small quarterlies and a large, illustrated, yearbook issue.

Rooting Proliferations

Use your greenhouse, too, for rooting daylily proliferations (small plants growing out of the flower scape). You will naturally want to propagate rare varieties as rapidly as possible. Cut the proliferations from the mother plant, place them in sphagnum moss or moist sand, and set them in the greenhouse. Here they grow rapidly and will continue to grow all winter. You will have blooming plants from them the following season. Otherwise you would have to wait 2 or more years for them to flower.

Southern Daylilies in a Northern Greenhouse

I have had gift plants of daylilies arrive from the South in November. This is too late to plant them out in my garden. These plants, being potted, continue growth in the greenhouse. Since most Southern-bred daylilies contain evergreen growth factors, they seldom die back in the greenhouse but remain green. They flower in early spring, long before our garden-grown daylilies.

Rosebushes in the greenhouse

Growing roses for cut flower production is generally unprofitable for the owner of a small greenhouse. However, if you wish to stock and sell cut roses as part of your retail florist operation, it will pay you to make arrangements for a supply of cut roses from a reliable grower or wholesale house.

You can make a nice profit on rosebushes, especially with an unheated greenhouse, by purchasing dormant plants and starting them into growth-or even into bud and bloom-for resale to home gardeners. You can buy them already potted or you can purchase bare-root bushes and pot them up yourself.

The container most widely used is a length of tar paper, cut and fitted to form a cylinder with a bottom, and held together by staples. An opening for drainage must be left in the bottom. Wh’en dealing with bare root roses, cut away enough of the roots of each plant so that when it is placed in the container, roots will just touch the walls. Use good fibrous, porous, potting soil such as a mixture of loam and peatmoss. Place a layer of charcoal at the bottom of the container, and then start building a mound of earth in the middle. Place the center of the rootstock on top of this mound. Fill the sides of the container with soil and cover the rootstock until the knobby graft union is about 1/2 inches above the soil. Water thoroughly and your potted rosebush is on its way.

In your selling (and advertising), you should promote the many advantages to the gardener in purchasing potted, growing stock. He can be certain the plants are alive, and if the plants are in bloom, he can be sure of getting exactly the colors he wants. Among the well-known rose growers in our city is Mrs. Alice Foss, who attends every annual convention of the American Rose Society. After viewing the newest in roses, she places orders for spring delivery. The bushes arrive in late February and early March. Mrs. Foss fitted up a shed with windows to let in all possible light and furnished it with potting benches. Here she works in comfort while potting up the roses. While the house is not artificially heated, the windows admit sunlight from morning until night. The rosebushes are safe here, and continue growing until the time arrives for gardeners to come by and pick up their orders.

A low priced plastic house of almost any type would also be ideal for this type of rose growing.

Hybridizing, or plant breeding, offers many profit-making opportunities to the new as well as the experienced grower. It is in this field that your greenhouse is most essential-an indispensable time- and money-saver for you. Many of the varieties you originate will appeal to the “dessert market”-collectors and other gardeners who, unmindful of cost, want to have the latest thing. You will find some of these customers in your vicinity, but you may have to rely mainly on mail-order sales.

Commercial men who stock new and different plants may provide an outlet for your hybrids. Still another possibility is supplying smaller dealers with stock on terms whereby you receive a percentage of sales.

My Greenhouse-Grown Hybrids

I have developed a number of unusual hybrids-gloxinias, African violets, and amaryllis-but my most salable plants are my gloxineras. These are intergeneric crosses between rech-steinerias and sinningias. But I don’t spend nearly as much time on hybridizing as I’d like to-and that apparently is the case with most other greenhouse growers. Thus the field is wide open-the market for new pot plants has never been better, and competition here is all but nil. Why not set your hands to hybridizing some of your plants? They can help you get a better profit from your greenhouse if you give them a chance.

Many Plants Can Be Tried

One greenhouse grower in Missouri makes a profit from creating new varieties of ferns. Others in the same area developing and selling hybridized African violets and gloxinias. An Oregon grower has produced a strain of hardy azaleas-all started from seeds in the greenhouse. Amateur as well as professional greenhouse gardeners have developed new chrysanthemums-some as seedlings, others as mutants.

I can’t possibly give the whole story of the “how-to, when-to, what-to-do” of plant hybridizing. But the following ideas should at least give you a start.

Flower arranging and designing will help you make more profit from your greenhouse. Some of the flowers and foliage you use can be grown in your greenhouse or gardenother material will have to be purchasedpreferably from a wholesaler, if one is accessible to you. New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Decoration Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are the big holidays when cut flowers, arrangements, accessories, greens, and corsages are in greatest demand. But there is also year-round trade for birthdays, parties, showers, weddings, and funerals. And there are other special days, and weeksFather’s Day, Halloween, Fourth of July, St. Patrick’s Day, Secretarial Week, and Sweetest Day (proclaimed sometime in mid-October). Your local Chamber of Commerce can fill you in on these dates.

If you have never made floral arrangements or corsages, it will pay you to take a course, locally or by mail. You might also do apprentice work at a local florist shop, and read books on this profit-making aspect of greenhouse operation. Your classified telephone directory will provide names of schools near you; correspondence schools advertise in national magazines.

Flower Design as a Career

A gardener in Washington who took a mail-order course in floral design for only 6 weeks, soon earned enough from sales of corsages, funeral sprays, and flower arrangements to pay for her course and show a profit. Another in Georgia earns as she learns by specializing in arrangements for silver and golden wedding anniversaries and church weddings.

You might enjoy flower designing so much that you will want to go to work for a local florist and specialize in this phase of commercial floriculture. Florist shops offer wonderful opportunities for those who enjoy working with flowers and dealing with the public.

Flowers on Commission

If your greenhouse is not large enough to grow the flowers you want for retail, and your town has no florist shop, you might try taking orders-that is, being the local agent for a florist shop in a nearby city. Many small towns have no florist, but still there is a demand for designs and arrangements for special occasions. An out-of-town shop will pay you a commission of 15 to 25 per cent of the selling price for handling their flowers.

Cutting and Storing Flowers

Some authorities recommend cutting flowers in the early morning when stems and flower heads contain a large amount of moisture. Others recommend later-afternoon cutting. It probably makes little difference if no foliage is attached to the stem, as with gladiolus, narcissus, orchids, and many other plants. Where there is a lot of foliage, I like morning. Cut-flower customers prefer-and pay more for-long-stemmed roses, snapdragons, stock, and chrysanthemums. With corsage flowers- orchids, camellias, and gardenias-stem length is unimportant.

Deep plunging of flowers into water immediately after they are cut reduces water loss from leaves, helps retain turgidity, and adds to life. Cut flowers should be kept out of bright sun and draughts, and humidity should be increased. Petalife and other water-soluble preservatives make cut flowers last longer. You can stock these products either to sell or to give away with each flower order.

Flowers placed in sealed packages and kept in temperatures of 40 to 50 degrees will keep weeks longer than the same flowers placed in water and stored at the same temperatures. Scrub all containers and keep them clean, for better appearance as well as to remove the bacteria which shorten the life of flowers.

An Illinois enthusiast grows orchids to make use of the blank and too often useless wall of his attached-to-the-home greenhouse. He fastens l1/2-inch galvanized mesh to the wall with expansion bolts. He pierces pieces of oak bark and inserts galvanized wire hangers to suit each piece of bark. These bits of wire are bent and hooked. Their small size permits him to hang them as close to or as far from the wall as is necessary. Pots can also be hung like this with little difficulty.

The Rehs of Illinois, whose Fiberglas greenhouse is described on page 40, grow many plants, but their profit-maker is orchids at wholesale. They sell cut flowers and plants to local florists in the St. Louis area, and they do all the work themselves caring for approximately 4,000 plants. Since these plants are for resale only, they avoid having to collect the state sales tax and make a monthly report on it. In the local market their home-grown orchids bring 50 cents more per blossom than shipped-in orchids.

With cisterns of rain water available, and plenty of light, they find they can feed their orchids more heavily and more often than most growers. Water temperature approximates a warm rain by an adjustment between the hot-water tank and the direct line from the cistern. An old, water-softener tank was converted, by replacing chemicals with fine sand, into a filter to remove algae and fungus spores. This keeps pots and osmunda fiber clean and fresh longer, and the roots of the plants are not smothered by an accumulation of moss and dirt. The Rehs grow their plastic-house orchids wetter than do glasshouse gardeners. Their phalaenopsis and cymbidiums, especially, seemed to be in a much damper growing medium than I have observed elsewhere. In their Fiberglas house, air circulation is increased according to seasonal temperatures.

L. J. Milan of Tulsa, Oklahoma, built an 8- by 20-foot orchid house for only $200.00, including benches. Walls and ceilings were made from spent, 48-inch, fluorescent light tubes. It has weathered 4 years of Oklahoma hailstorms and winter temperatures occasionally as low as 10 degrees. He makes a good profit on flowers alone and sells no plants. In winter he heats economically with two 15,000 BTU orchid-house-unit heaters, and holds the temperature at 60 degrees.

Orchid success stones are legion. You can always be sure of sales if you grow these plants.

Haemanthus, better known as the African blood lily, is fast becoming a popular pot plant. This is an excellent item for collectors, growers of rare house plants, or the gardener who wants one or two “conversation” plants. One firm now lists seven species, and you can get an effective start toward stocking your greenhouse by purchasing a bulb or two of each. I have procured seeds from Africa and grown many of my haemanthus from them. Most bulbs send out many offsets, and these can be removed when they are about a year old. Since the older bulbs retail for

79. A profit-packed bench of orchid plants, ready to please all kinds of customers among the ever-expanding legions of orchid hobbyists. And there’s usually a good market for the cut blooms too. Note the super-drainage holes in the special orchid pots. (Photograph by Genereux)

$1.50 to $10.00, these offsets, especially those of the rarer sorts, are easy to sell. Almost all species are good seed setters. The usual method of pollinating is to rub your hand over the flowers every day while plants are in bloom. This insures pollen distribution of the small flowers.

While the majority of haemanthus grow best in bright light, the white-flowered one, H. albiflos, flowers only in a shaded location.

Haemanthus Katharinea produces a hundred or more tomato-red flowers and supple green leaves; H. multiflora, with its beautifully proportioned flower head, is recommended for the beginner. The neck of the bulb is speckled red, and the flower scape, 12 to 14 inches high, firmly supports the ball of red flowers. Other varieties, as H. magniftcus, and H. coccineus also are red or reddish orange, while H. albiflos and its variations have tassels of white flowers.

Haemanthus requires little rest. Some of the red-flowered varieties shed their foliage about 4 to 6 weeks before sending up bloom scapes; H. albiflos remains evergreen, shedding only some of the older leaves. I keep my haemanthus in the greenhouse the year round, never setting them in dark quarters for a dormant period.

The fancy-leaved geraniums are prized by collectors and find favor, too, with the gardener who wants a “different” pot or bedding plant. Although the leaf colors are varied, they do not clash when planted together. Grow them in strong sunshine to bring out their full beauty. One profit-gardener makes a specialty of these. She grows masses of them outside on a sunny slope and sells cuttings directly from the bed.

Popular among the fancy types are Happy Thought, Marshall MacMahon, Bronze Beauty, Skies of Italy, and Mrs. Pollock. Beckwith Pride, Hills of Snow, and Attraction are among the silver- and green-leaved; Gold Leaf, Verona, Cloth of Gold, and tiny Dwarf Gold Leaf have gold leaves.

Unusual and Fine-Flowering Types

These fascinating varieties have sales appeal for the collector as well as those who want unusual house or garden plants. In this group are the Bird’s Egg pelargoniums with the lower petals of the flower touched and splashed with darker color. There are few of these listed by dealers. If you can secure plants to propagate, you will be assured of a stock item with exceptional sales value.

Less rare but popular is the notched-petal group listed as Jeanne, Carnation, or Sweet William. These flowers have “pinked” petals-like a carnation. The Rosebud geraniums have very double flowers like tiny partially opened rosebuds. Favorite varieties are Apple Blossom, Magenta, and Scarlet Rosebud, whose flowers open wider than the others. Then there is the Poinsettia group with narrow, uneven petals of varying size. Red Poinsettia has short petals of lavender pink. The pure white one, Noel, may be listed under Cactus-flowered.

Another group is called Phlox because its eyed-florets resemble the garden phlox. Both Phlox and its variety, New Phlox, are popular.