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Dish gardens

If you plan a retail business-no matter how small-you will want to feature some dish gardens. Perhaps you have a friend who designs interesting and colorful ceramic bowls. If so, why not team up with her? She’ll earn money from the sale of the bowl, and you will earn some from the sale of the plants, as well as from planning and planting the tiny garden.

Landscape schemes for dish gardens are plentiful. Use material of a size to suit the container. Also, be sure to use compatible plants, that is, those which thrive under the same general conditions. Remember-most of these little gardens will go into homes where they will lack the special care you have given them.

Saxifraga, the strawberry begonia, baby tears (Helxine), small-leaved ivy, or plectranthus, are all nice to trail over the edge of a dish. Succulents, wax begonia, pilea, echeveria, kalanchoe, peperomia, and bromeliads are some of the accent materials I have used in dish gardens.

Since the dish is without drainage outlet, place pebbles and charcoal in the bottom, then add the right type of soil for the plants you are using. If you carry a line of figurines in your shop, you may be able to sell more of them by including them in the dish garden.

Seeds of royal poinciana germinate in a few days and within a matter of 2 to 3 weeks make enchanting trees for dish gardens.

The price you charge for your dish garden will, of course, depend on the type of materials and accessories you use. A friend of mine made several hundred dollars from the sale of succulents planted in gilded, individual aluminum-foil pie pans. Each planting had a “clinker” from the furnace to add interest at the base. This was touched lightly with green, red, and bronze paint. Three tiny sedums of varied height made up the living material. This man sold these dish gardens at the wholesale price of 39 cents each; they retailed for more than twice that amount.

Evergreens

Evergreens, such as junipers, yew, and arborvitae, are good profit-makers. Start them in the fall by making any of the three types of cuttings; simple, heel, or mallet. The heel cutting has a slice of the parent stem with it. Make cuttings 2- to 8- inches long.

Builder’s sand makes a splendid rooting medium. Insert the cuttings about to 1 inch apart. After planting, moisten well to settle the sand. Grown in a cool house (55 to 65 degrees) with slight bottom heat, cuttings root rapidly. Do not have ventilators open during this rooting period, nor is it necessary to shade the greenhouse. Shade will not be needed until April or May.

In the spring, the rooted cuttings can be moved to a sheltered place in the outdoor garden or under a lath house and the vacated greenhouse benches can be used for growing flats of started annuals or other material. At 18 months, evergreen cuttings can be lined out in the garden for further growth, or placed with other nursery stock to be sold as seedlings at a lower price.

Specialties for dried arrangements

Flower shows frequently call for the inclusion of dried material in at least one of the arrangement classes. While those with gardens may plant strawflowers, coxcomb, and perhaps amaranth, seldom do they grow the red-fruited love apple (Solatium integrifolium).

You can purchase seeds from several specialists. Since love applies are a relative of the Jerusalem cherry, a start from seeds is recommended. These plants, however, grow to two feet. As soon as the weather is reasonably warm, plant them in the outdoor garden, if you have room. Otherwise, carry them on in the greenhouse or lath house. If started sufficiently early, they will show their large tomato-like fruits in August or September. After the first frost, cut the stems and hang them upside down to dry. They will shed their leaves and the thorny stalk will gradually turn gray. Florists are particularly eager to buy this material.

From a 25 cent seed package one grower realized 25 dollars in the sale of the dried plants. This is a wonderful item for the roadside market. Martynia louisiana, whose pods look like birds, is also exotic material for dried arrangements. Culture is like that of the love apple. Any of these four plants-statice, lunaria, loosestrife, or Chinese lantern-started in the greenhouse and grown on in the outdoor garden for dried material, will also prove to be moneymakers.

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.

There is a big field in the hybridizing of daylilies. Recently I attended a gathering of enthusiasts where some new varieties were being auctioned off. One brought $150.00! This was, of course, a rather rare exception, but the majority of new named varieties do sell for $25.00 to $50.00 per clump.

Daylilies from Seed

Daylilies are somewhat easier than iris to grow from seed. Pollination is simple and the seed pods ripen in about 6 weeks.

Southern growers simply plant the seed outdoors, and many of them germinate and become established seedlings before chilly winter weather arrives. The seedlings, able to grow through the entire season, usually flower within 12 to 18 months.

In the North, our growing season is so short that, without the aid of a greenhouse, daylilies may take 3 years to flower from seed. Seed planted in the fall and kept in active growth throughout the winter in a greenhouse will ofttimes flower the next fall or, at the latest, the following summer, thus trimming 1 to 2 years off the normal time from seed to flower. I like to plant daylily seeds in flats some time in November and place the flats outdoors, stacking them one on the other. In February, some of the flats are brought in to the greenhouse and within 10 days to 3 weeks, flats become dotted with green seedlings. (Incidentally, if you lack upper bench area you can slip the flats under your fluorescent lights.) The daylily seedlings can grow right on in the flats or bulb pans until it is time to transplant them into the garden.

When transplanting, cut at least half of the foliage back to make sturdier plants.

Selling iris rhizomes can make money for you. While the older varieties go for as little as 50 cents a rhizome, newer hybrids bring from $5.00 to $25.00 or more per rhizome. You can sell rhizomes directly from your garden, or take them from your garden and force them in the cool greenhouse; you can also purchase and divide clumps; or grow iris from seed.

If you plan on dividing and selling iris from your garden, divide clumps in early fall and plant the divisions in the cold frame. In early spring, remove them from the frame, bring them into the cool greenhouse, and pot the rhizomes separately. You’ll start selling them when they are in bud or bloom in April or May.

If you want to sell the newest varieties, order them wholesale for fall or spring delivery. Handle the fall-delivered ones just as though you had dug them from your own garden. As soon as you receive your spring orders, pot them up in gallon cans or pots made from building paper.

Iris from Seed

It takes patience to raise iris from seed, for the seed may take a year or more to germinate. However, if you have hand-pollinated some of your best stock or have purchased seeds of good stock, you will find that growing them on in the greenhouse speeds the process. If you plan to sell iris as part of your nursery program, you will find this is the cheapest method of acquiring a large number of colors and forms.

Seed can be planted any time of year. Spring sowing can be done in flats or pots and the plantings then placed outdoors. Kept well watered, seeds usually germinate during the summer. If they fail to sprout, wait until the temperature dips to at least 40 degrees and thoroughly chills the plantings before bringing them into the greenhouse. Fall-sown seed can be placed outside and left to chill or even freeze. After this, bring the containers into the greenhouse. Germination will be spotty, but your seedlings will have sufficient start so that they can be transplanted to a cold frame or directly into the garden in early spring. Plants grown this way usually flower the second year, thereby saving a year of valuable time for the hybridizer.

I have had success germinating iris and hemerocallis (day-lily) seeds by half-filling the ice trays in the refrigerator with water and inserting two or three seeds in each cubicle. When the half cube of ice forms, I fill the rest of the tray with water and let the seeds freeze. About a week after this severe treatment, I thaw out the ice cubes and plant the iris seeds in bulb pans of sterilized loam, peatmoss, and sand, which then go into the greenhouse. Temperatures need not be as high as those in my greenhouse-55 to 60 degrees is about right. But I do get good results from this method. However, freezing seeds is not recommended for Louisiana iris.

Perhaps you are not particularly interested in making money from selling potted plants, bulbs, or seeds. Still, you want a self-supporting or profit-making greenhouse. A number of hybridizers use their greenhouses to hasten the growth of many plants, including iris, hemerocallis, and roses. Others devote their houses to the propagation of dahlias. Still others find a greenhouse ideal for promoting the growth of young evergreens which will eventually be sold for landscaping.

If you don’t sell all of the annuals started in your greenhouse, why not set them out in the garden and grow them for cut flowers? Leftover tomato plants can also be handled profitably. A roadside proprietor near us sets his in neat rows out in the garden. When the tomatoes ripen he puts up this sign:

Tomatoes-Vine Ripened

YOU PICK ‘EM

50 per bushel

With no more work than the original planting, and some weeding and watering, this grower realizes hundreds of dollars every season from materials which otherwise he might discard.

Herbs and other specialty plants also have a good profit potential.

Chromosomes and colchicine

All plants bear within their cells microscopic substances called chromosomes. These, along with other elements, determine such characteristics as height, contour, flowers, foliage, fruit, and roots, as well as the degree of hardiness of the variety. (For a detailed report on chromosomes see, Chromosome Atlas of Flowering Plants by C. D. Darlington and A. P. Wylie.)

Through the use of the drug colchicine it is possible to alter chromosome numbers, thereby creating new types of plants. Apply the colchicine solution directly to the growing tip of the plant. The changes which occur will show as the plant matures. These may be desirable developments such as a change to thicker stems and larger flowers, which we find in the Supreme types of African violets and in such garden plants as the Tetra snapdragons.

Colchicine can be purchased at drugstores and some seed stores, or directly from Romaine B. Ware, Canby, Oregon. If you procure it from a drugstore, use it as a 0.1 or 0.2 per cent solution (1/5 gram in 100 cubic centimeters of water). Your druggist will help you with these measurements. If you are mathematically inclined, convert cubic centimeters into fluid ounces by multiplying the number of cubic centimeters by 0.03381382.

Mutations

Mutations (or sports) are natural changes in plant structure. They occur with fair regularity, but most of them are not improvements over the parent plant. Occasionally, however, some definitely desirable mutation may appear on a plant in your greenhouse. You can propagate from this sport by cuttings (and sometimes by seed) and grow the progeny to flowering stage to really determine the value and the permanence of its novel characteristics.

Keep an alert eye on new foliage and flower growths. Some of them may be mutants valuable enough to be of interest to commercial dealers. Such dealers may want to buy the variety outright or, if you have propagated it, they may want to buy all the stock you have. Mutations in African violets are quite common and many of our best varieties have been discovered as mutants, then propagated, named, and sold. Daylily and marigold hybridizers are constantly searching for the near-white or pure white flower. Some expert hybridizers feel that the pure white varieties of these two garden plants, if and when they finally appear, will be produced as mutants.

Plant Selection

Plant selection merely entails selection over a period of years of the best plants in any given lot. These are self-pollinated or propagated in other ways, and their offspring grown on. Nothing new, other than the possibility of a mutant, is likely to arise, but through conscientious selection-keeping the best and disposing of the poorer, weaker ones-you can develop an outstanding collection of best-in-their-class plants.