Making money from your garden

(Excerpted from The New Food Garden)

Working in your garden is such a nice way to spend your time, you may have daydreamed about how wonderful it would be if you could make a living doing it. There really is no reason why your garden shouldn’t make money for you, at least enough to pay for itself and maybe more (how much more largely depends upon the size of your garden and your energy). Producing something to sell is often the easy part though, actually selling it is the hard part. I am never short of ideas, so here are a few possible ways to make money.

Vegetables - Every successful vegetable gardener occasionally has more food that they can eat during the summer months and you could start by trying to sell your surplus (one possible market for this would be to grow vegetables for your neighbors for a pre-arranged weekly fee). If this proves feasible you could start planting a few extra rows or beds specifically to sell (this is a cottage garden tradition in fact). I think we need to develop a new kind of commercial gardening, somewhere between market gardening and traditional home vegetable gardening. Producing food doesn’t just have to be the domain of the farmer with hundreds of acres, or even the market gardener with 2 or 5 acres. It’s been estimated that you could make a living from intensively cultivating only an eighth of an acre. You just need to use the right techniques and grow the right crops (and try to have them available while no one else does and prices are high).

Fruit - You could also sell fruit as well as vegetables, it takes even less work and may be easier to sell. In fact this could be a good way to dispose of the over abundance of fruit that comes from getting too interested in fruit trees. A few productive trees can give you a lot of fruit in a short time and often a lot goes to waste, simply because you just can’t use it all. Just make sure you grow the best-flavored highest quality varieties. You could also try drying fruit to sell at a later date, or add value by making preserves or pies.

Salad mix - Salad mix is a high value intensive crop that is easy to grow and doesn’t require much space. I have known a couple of people who made a good living growing edible flowers for chic restaurants (one even sold her weeds too).

Berries - A high value crop of berries only takes a couple of years to get going (strawberries even less). As with tree fruit you could sell fresh or dried fruit, or make preserves or pies (maybe sell to coffee shops). The drawback to berries is that they take time to harvest and are perishable (if they are in danger of going bad make preserves out of them).

Herbs – You could grow culinary herbs, tea herbs, or the more specialized medicinal herbs (for sale fresh or dry). You could also add value to your medicinal herbs by making salves, tinctures, essential oils, cosmetics and more. You could grow and dry herbs for making tea, or get equipped to make your own tea bags (make your own tea blends and put them in fancy boxes).

Mushrooms - Mushrooms and other fungi might be grown on a small scale, indoors or out and could provide you with a high value crop. You might even coppice trees to grow logs for growing shitake or oyster mushrooms  If you are successful at this, you might also sell spawn of various edible species, so people can grow their own.

Eggs - Grow your own chicken feed and sell eggs.

Seed sprouts, micro-greens - Save your own seeds and use them to grow sprouts for sale.

Cut flowers – Another easy one.

Food stall - You could try selling all of the above foods (and other products) at your local flea market, or set up a roadside stand.

Craft materials - Basket Willows are easy to grow and are in demand from craftspeople. Other craft products you could grow would include dried flowers, dye plants, scented plants, vines and other basket or wreath making materials.

Bamboo - Bamboo plants are expensive to buy but easy to grow. It would take a couple of years to build up enough stock to sell, but then you could have all the plants you could sell. You might even offer an invasive bamboo removal service (then pot it up and sell it). You could also produce canes for gardeners or for use in various crafts,

Ornamental plants - Hobby ornamentals such as Dahlias, Orchids, Begonias, Iris and others offer a lot of scope for sales, though you have to be interested in the plants.

Honey - Bees improve the garden by helping out with pollination, while providing a valuable and saleable product (honey) at the same time.

Alcoholic drinks - Many fruits can be used to make wine, not just grapes. There would no doubt be a market for some of the more unusual ones. Get adventurous and add herbs, flowers, fruits, etc. You could grow hops and make beer, honey to make mead, apples to make hard cider, wormwood to make absinthe, agave to make tequila, barley to make beer or moonshine or grapes to make raki. Of course there are legal restrictions and taxes on selling alcoholic beverages which usually make it illegal.

Smoking materials - You could grow the herbs (Bearberry, Mullein, Coltsfoot, Mint and more) to make your own herbal smoking mixtures. I would find this quite fascinating, if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t like to get smoke in my lungs. It is also easy to grow tobacco, which actually grows as a short lived perennial in my garden (I don’t smoke it, but I gave some to a smoker friend and he said it was the best tobacco he had ever had). Selling tobacco is also illegal in most places because of tax laws.

Seeds – You could sell your own locally produced and adapted seed from heirloom and unusual varieties. If you save your own vegetable seed you usually have a big surplus anyway. If your garden contains a lot of unusual edibles, you could allow them to produce seed and collect it for sale. If you are an artist it gives you the chance to make beautiful seed packets too.

Seedlings - If you are already growing vegetable and herb seedlings for your own use, you might also grow extra plants to sell. If you have useful plants that produce short lived, large seeds (Chestnuts, Hazels, Walnuts) you could grow seedlings for sale. You might also be able to pot up self-sown seedlings.

Propagating plants - Many plants are easily raised from bulbs, tubers, cuttings, layering and division. You could make money propagating food plants for sale, especially the more unusual cultivars. If more people did this then many useful plants could become better known and more widely available. Craigslist.com is a fantastic resource for selling any plants you can produce, as it can put you in touch with buyers of even the most obscure things.

Gardening supplies - If you have a big truck you could find a good source for manure, compost, mulch, shredded bark and supply less mobile gardeners with these important materials.

Garden advisor - We need a new kind of hands-on gardener/small farmer/consultant, ready to share knowledge with neighbors and help them to grow more of their own food and make city neighborhoods blossom. Once your garden is sufficiently developed you could teach others how to plant and maintain this kind of garden. This could tie in well with selling surplus useful plants. Don’t do this until you have gained sufficient knowledge though. There are many more people who like the idea of being teachers, than there are people worth listening to.

If you have come up with other ways of making your garden pay for itself I would love to hear them.