Some profitable ventures

Clarence Johnston of Osseo, Minnesota, starts tubers in his home in February, moving them in May to an unheated pit greenhouse where they are ready for market by August. One department store buys his entire output. Since he grows his plants without heat, he can figure on more than usual profits.

Maude Cogswell of Hamburg, New York, who sells mainly by mail, believes that you can make even the smallest greenhouse a paying proposition. She grows plants in a mixture of Michigan peat, Bacto Sand, and chicken grits, and gives weekly feedings of a complete soluble fertilizer. One huge bench is filled with sphagnum moss, and gloxinias there get liquid fertilizing twice a week. She has found the horticultural formulas containing Gibrel (the growth-boosting gibberellic acid) such as Mira-Cell and others, most helpful in rooting plants and starting expensive and hard-to-germinate seeds. Bamboo porch screens, costing $4.00 each, shade the attached, lean-to greenhouse and reduce temperature by some 10 degrees. In winter, heavy transparent plastic on the windows inside the house cuts heating costs. Cost of upkeep on the steel and brick structure amounts to little more than an annual coat of paint.

In Bethel, Vermont, a retired banker and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. F. J. Sargent, decided to enroll in a florist course. While studying, they set up a 3-bench prefab house, with a shed attached for a gift shop. Now they are full-fledged florists, growing “a little of everything” in 10 greenhouse sections with one devoted to gloxinias which are sold in all stages, dormant tubers, seedlings, and flowering gift plants. This last is most profitable, since the Sargents live on the road to the hospital. For their big days, Christmas, Easter, Mother’s Day, and Thanksgiving, they buy extra plants in quantity from a wholesale florist. Their workroom is in the basement of their home, where they have installed a large walk-in refrigerator.

Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Day of Springfield, Illinois, purchased, for $200.00, a model 14- by 16-foot greenhouse erected by a lumber company, and moved it to their city lot and filled it with gloxinias and African violets. To show off his plants, Mr. Day took some to his office where the office people snapped them up and also asked to visit his greenhouse, which meant more sales. The Days soon expect to make their project self-supporting and then, at retirement, expand their business into a full-time money-maker.

Tags: home greenhouse

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