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Nursery Q&A

Hey guys, I’m so glad you are reading this today because we have a bunch of questions from the audience and we’re gonna answer as many as we can!

News

I got the tomatoes tied up in the garden! Maybe I’ll get some pictures of those when they start growing well on the new trellis system. Right now they look sad and not very photogenic.

We have an awesome new video class coming up that will take you from start to finish and teach you how to make your own handmade knife, you want to talk about an awesome skill and hobby to have. Creating a knife from raw materials and knowing it was made by you is really cool, and what an amazing gift to give someone at Christmas or for a birthday. Or to hand down to a child or grandchild. That’s coming up, and I’ll let you know more details as we get them.

OH! Baby goats are here! We now have 3 baby goats prancing around in the woods, 2 of them were born late last week, doing well! No more ducks have disappeared thankfully. I don’t know what happened to most of the muscovy hens, one is setting on eggs in the chicken coop, one roosts on the roof, and the rest are gone. I still hope that they are all sitting on nests hidden away, but I think the blasted foxes might have taken them. Lost a couple of the ducks that I hatched last year, they should be starting to lay soon. We need to get some of the drakes harvested for the freezer for sure. I don’t want those girls to get too roughed up by overeager drakes.

Other than that, everything is pretty normal. Catie’s parents got the boys a swing set, so he and I put it together and now the boys have a swing again. They are loving it! So even though the tire swing tree came down, they have a swing to play on. We’ve got it set up right out back of the house where Catie can keep an eye on them and they get to “shoo the ducks”. The two year old doesn’t want the ducks around the house so one of his favorite things to do is to “shoo that ducks”.

Plant of the Week

Apples! Someone recently called me the modern Johnny Appleseed because I have so many apple seedlings going on our property, I don’t know about that, but I think apples are fantastic and I can’t wait to get some of my own cultivars going!!

Propagation

Named cultivars should be grafted onto appropriate root stock for disease resistance. I’m sure you’ve heard that to find the next good apple you have to plant ten thousand seeds to get a good apple. That is not true! You might get a decent eating apple 1 out of 10. It might not be a pretty apple, or it might not ship well, it might be hard and only really good for cider or cooking. But don’t fall into the trap of not doing something good, just because you think you might fail! It’s so frustrating to me when people give up before ever even trying! Or they repeat defeatist language and suck the joy and adventure out of life by saying things like “it’ll be so hard”, or “it will take so long”. Plant some apple seeds! See what happens! You might get awful apples, cut them down and try again! You might plant 20 apple seeds and get 1 good apple. Do you know what? That apple is now your very own, unique in all the world apple. Nobody else has that same apple tree. That’s something amazing and special!

Now you probably want to know how to do it, well I’m glad you are ready! You need to cold stratify the seed, that means you soak the seed for 24 hours in clean water. Then rinse the seed off and dump out the soak water. Add the seed to a plastic bag or glass jar half full of moist sterile potting mix or vermiculite, or perlite. I like potting mix or vermiculite for this. Leave air in the container, and don’t seal it all the way. Put that in your refrigerator, or even better yet, in a small cooler in the fridge, that’s to help even out the lows and highs that happen in a fridge. You’ll leave it there for 1 to 4 months cold and moist.

Periodically check on it to make sure the mix stays moist. Then when it’s time to plant them out, some of the seeds should be starting to root, that’s the perfect time to either plant the individual seeds, or spread them out on a tray to be grown a little before transplanting later, or put in pots, however you want to plant them, get them in some soil with a little fertility. They’ll shoot up and sometimes grow a foot or 2 the first year depending on growing conditions.

I could go on for a while on growing apples, but for now, I think that’s enough for the plant of the week. I love the greek proverb that says “Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” So don’t be discouraged by the fact that you might not eat the apples, or that it will take years before they bear. Think of how long it takes to plant a seed and ask yourself, what if I would have done that ten years ago? That tree would be producing a hundred pounds of food a year easily.

Interesting Things

I’ve got a cool one for you today. You might have already heard of this, but if not then you’ll be thanking me for sure! We have started fermenting our chicken feed. Say wha??? Yep, I’m fermenting our chicken feed now because I was a dummy and left the lid off the feed bin and accidentally let a brand new sack of laying pellets get rained on. It filled up the trashcan (we use metal trash cans for feed bins) and I wasn’t about to waste the stuff, so the next day I dumped it in a big wash basin on the ground where the chickens could get to it and it kept fermenting there for the next several days. They loved it and our egg production went up like crazy! So I’m convinced! Here are some of the benefits I’ve been told happen when you start feeding fermented feed.

They waste less because it’s wet and they don’t peck through it or toss it on the ground.

The fermentation process partially digests the food making it much more easily processed and utilized better by the bird’s digestive system. So you get more food value for the same cost.

The birds are healthier because of all the probiotics they are ingesting.

The poop is firmer, and doesn’t smell as bad! Now that’s a bonus!

And it cuts down on rodent issues because it’s not as available for rodents, that’s because they clean it up!

Lastly, it’s supposed to increase the protein content, I’m not positive about that, but hey, if it does, great, if it doesn’t I don’t care because the eggs are larger, and they lay more eggs on the fermented feed vs not. So check into fermenting your chicken food! Maybe next week I’ll to an episode all on fermenting chicken feed and supplementing their feed needs with cheap inputs!

Small Scale Nursery Q&A

We got a lot of questions from listeners on the facebook, Hi guys!! So I figured I would answer some of your questions on the nursery side of things. Maybe I’ll do an episode or three on plant propagation in the future, but I’m trying to stay on topic. You know it’s easy for me to rabbit trail. Speaking of rabbits, I’m kidding, let’s get into these questions!

How to make your own Potting Mix

I talk about this in Episode 3 if you haven’t listened, you might want to go back and check that episode out for a little more info. http://www.homegrownliberty.com/starting-seeds-for-my-garden/
But here are a few recipes you can use. This can get as simple or complicated as you want it to be.
Nutrient Poor Mix

• 3 parts sifted peat moss, or milled sphagnum moss
• 1 part perlite – for drainage and to reduce weight
• 1 part vermiculite – for drainage, moisture retention and to reduce weight

Adequate Nutrient Mix

• 4 parts compost
• 2 parts coir or sifted peat moss
• 1 part vermiculite
• 1/2 part perlite

Nutrient Rich Mix

• 4 part sifted compost
• 2 part sand
• 2 part coir or sifted peat moss
• 1 part rabbit manure
• 1/8 part azomite
• 1/8 part kelp meal
• 1/4 tsp sea salt per cubic foot of potting mix

I also like to add some beneficial microorganisms to the mix like mycorrhizal inoculants and IMOs. Now remember that this is so easy to get complicated, but completely not necessary. Like I said at the beginning, you can stay very basic and just go with a standard potting mix recipe like the nutrient poor mix above, or you can beef it up with anything else in the other recipes. By no means do you need to think that those recipes are set in stone. If you don’t have one of the components, don’t worry about it. Just remember that you are aiming for a light, fluffy, moisture holding medium that will support the life of the plants you pot in it. That may mean nutrient dense, or it may by necessity be nutrient poor so you can regulate growth with fertilizer additions as you see fit.

How to Package and Ship

Well this question deserves a lot more attention than I’ll be able to cover here, but the short quick answer is that you need to ship when the plant will likely arrive alive. For most things in the most general sense of the word, that means when the plant is dormant. Wintertime or early spring before it wakes from dormancy. You need to make sure that it will stay moist, and that it can breathe. Don’t wrap it tightly in plastic, and don’t saturate it in water. You want it just moist, and give it space to breathe without letting the plants jostle around enough to spill the medium all over the place.

What to pack it in? You can use a potting mix, or sawdust, or shredded paper, anything that will support the plant, and keep it moist. People even use the same gel as disposable diapers, it works great, but why go to the expense of using some polymer like that when something that is 100% non-toxic and good for your soil is just as easy and likely cheaper. And last but not least is getting it there as quickly as possible. You don’t want the plants to be in a box for a week or two floating around. I like to use the flat rate shipping boxes. Easy, simple, and relatively quick.

Protecting Planted Seed from Pests

Rodents can be a big problem, rats, mice, squirrels are all notorious for stealing your seed right out of a bed, or snipping your seedlings off right above the ground and eating them or even leaving them there when they don’t like the taste. So either rodent proof your grow area, or be vigilant about trapping.

For grow beds, if you have gophers or chipmunks or any kind of ground squirrels, you probably want to put hardware cloth underneath your beds to prevent them from digging up into the space where your seed is planted. You can also cover the top in hardware cloth to keep rodents from digging the seed up. Honestly, that’s the most reliable and foolproof way to protect them. If you have a large area like a greenhouse, what you probably want to do is to set traps along the outside of the structure with cover over the traps. Rodents don’t like being in the open where a predator can see them, so they run for cover as often as it’s available, what a better place to put a trap than where the rodents want to go!

Reselling vs. Growing Your Own
Does reselling make more sense than starting from seed? (I.e. Buying in bulk and selling in small quantity at a higher price) and if so when, and when not to.

Well I’ll just give you my thoughts. If you have a ready market, and you don’t have the time to get the plants up to size. It might make sense to purchase in bulk to re-package and sell smaller quantities. The benefits to doing so, are that it’s a very short learning curve, all you do is repackage and ship, you also have a lower risk with time because you will get the trees ready to ship and just turn around and resell. But again, the risk is in the capital expenditure. You will have a bunch of money tied up in plants that you either must sell or keep alive for another year.

Growing your own will greatly increase your profitability. But it requires you knowing what to do to keep the plants growing well, healthy, and you run the risk of a crop failure. So one tactic might be to resell the wholesale product while you are waiting on your own stock to grow and build your skill level. Personally, I think if you are doing that, you should be up front about what you’re doing, maybe you’re improving the product or packaging it in small enough quantities that people can afford to do smaller projects. That’s what I think. If you have the financial capital to make the upfront investment in the bulk amounts but not the time to raise the plants yourself from seed or cuttings, then that’s when it makes sense to do so. Otherwise I think it’s lower risk to start your own from seed and grow them up on site. But that might just be cause I’m comfortable with the idea of raising those little seedlings. Sometimes you’ll have one bad day and lose a whole batch to some problem or oversight. It all comes down to your risk tolerance and financial outlay.

Set Pricing

Next is setting prices. This is something that so many people seem to just go straight off the rails with and do no calculations. You need to make sure you know EXACTLY what all your costs are, and estimate the amount of time you have invested in each unit. If you are using pots, you need to know what each pot costs, what each unit of potting mix costs, every little thing that is a consumable needs to be accounted for so you don’t end up upside down without knowing what happened. Some people go to a box store or local nursery and say, well I’ll charge the same amount and that will be good, they’re making a profit, so I will too. You would be quite wrong. Those large nurseries are buying materials by the truckload and get significant discounts for buying in quantities like that. They have tiny margins of profit because they can afford to do so by selling in bulk as well. You won’t be doing that. If you are selling plants locally, find out what a large volume of pots will cost, enough to last a year, then break that number down to a per plant expense, do that with everything like I said. Potting mix, fertilizer, electricity (if you are using it) find out what all those costs are. Let’s say the pot is $0.25, the potting mix is $0.35, and the other misc costs add up to $1.25. Your total cost per plant is $1.85.

Let’s assume you will lose some plants to mishaps, so let’s round that cost up to $1.90. And you will have some losses in shipping or to appease customers, round the cost up to $2.00 just to make it easy math. Each one of those plants now costs you $2 to make. If you sell a 4” pot for $2.50 like the big stores, you will be working for less than minimum wage. Maybe you’re alright with that because it’s just a hobby that you enjoy and you aren’t really in it to make money.

But I would price each plant at a profitable price point. Add up your time involvement, calculate your time at $20 per hour or whatever it comes out to, and break it down to how long it takes you to raise 100 of those plants up to sale. Let’s just say it’s a dollar per plant in time. Then take that new cost number at $3.00, and add between 20% and 50% to come up with your price point. You would be selling at $3.60 and $4.50 per plant now.

Use the same type of analysis to determine bare root plants. Now you can actually make a little more money on them because the inherent value of the plant is higher than the trash plastic pot you had to buy, or whatever kind of container you grew them in.

Then you can take it a step further, let’s say you have an annual plant sale extravaganza for your community. Make bundle pricing, or kit pricing. Sell them 5 pots of culinary herbs for $15. They save some money and you made a bigger sale. I’d rather have extra sales of a larger pot than smaller sales with a higher profit margin.

There were a lot of other questions people had on this topic so maybe we’ll revisit this in the future. But I do want to leave you with some encouragement to not let any of these things stand in the way of you getting out there and making something new happen in your life. Little victories and small steps towards freedom and liberty add up if you keep plugging away at it. Don’t get discouraged, practice makes better and it only takes about 20 hours of dedicated work to get good at a new skill.

If you are on facebook, join our online community there at the Homegrown Liberty Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/homegrownliberty/ introduce yourself and share what you’ve been working towards, ask for help and guidance. That’s what we’re here for and that’s what I want to do is help every single one of you grow into greater freedom and liberty in your own lives.

Until next week

I hope you have a wonderful day, God Bless. And as always “Go Do Good Things”