Your Questions About Gardening

GardenersCardiff answers:

You answered your own question:
“my mom and dad wont let me grow my own food…”
Their house, their rules. Wait until you get older and get your own place, you’ll have all the freedom (and responsibilities) that you can handle.

GardenersCardiff answers:

Growing for profit means long hours and low pay, few farmers get rich doing this. You may feel confident that you can grow food for market but have you ever grown on at least 1/2 acre (and really 3 acres is the minimum i would suggest in order to grow enough to make money) and are you familiar with succession planting so you have crop to sell for more than say 2 to 3 weeks.

If you want to sell from home know that you will have to do a lot of marketing in order to let people know that you are there. Just because you grow stuff and set up a table does not mean anyone will stop and buy your stuff. Also know that when you are selling direct to the public marketing ought to take up around 60% of your time and growing about 40%.

Farmers markets can be lucrative after you have built up a customer base which takes 1 to 4 years to do. A nice thing about farmers market is they do the advertising for you and pull in hundreds or thousands of people so you have a ready market and they can be a lot of fun.

Selling from home often does mean you will wait around all day for 1 or 2 people to show up and maybe buy something, unless you are spending quite a bit of money advertising your farm stand. You also need to check and see if it is legal to sell from your house, many places will not allow commercial activity such as selling food.

To find a store to sell your stuff first you will need liability coverage. Most places require at least $1,000,000 in coverage before they will buy your stuff. Than it is as simple as going around to stores and talking to produce managers and asking if they will buy your stuff. Do know if you go this rout you will gross about 1/2 what you will gross selling direct as no grocery store is going to pay you full price for your food. What i mean is at a FM you can usually get around $2 for a pound of tomatoes but if you sell to a grocery store they will pay at most $1 for your tomatoes but they will also buy a lot at once.

Locally owned high end restaurants are another possibility for selling produce.

But do know it will take you at least 3 years before you can net more than $5K a year unless you go into this in a gig way but in order to do that you would have to go into debt for say $250K and would have to be netting at least $25K just to not go bankrupt.

GardenersCardiff answers:

I think it is sound and weel done you, keep it up.

I want to get a croft where one day I will be able to provide good produce and teach people where things come from and maybe how to cook it and grow but that will be way in the future and I am only 23 lol

Fresh is best and you can’t get better than home grown. I hope you continue when you get a place and teach your children in the future. People have no clue about things and it is shameful, they take things for granted.