When I lived in New England, I struggled with the short growing season. As a student and a mom, it was difficult to make time for anything other than school or my daughter anyway. Money was tight and I was living with my [extremely supportive] parents. I worked at a greenhouse during the summer months and made some money, but once that ended in the fall and I went back to college classes, I needed to find some other way to make money.
I noticed that in my area, more and more people were looking for organic options when it came to food. However, there were no greenhouses within a large radius focused on providing organic herb and vegetable starts.
Personally, I prefer to garden and eat crops grown conventionally. I'm sure I'll lose a few of you on this topic, because those who care about it really care about it. Here's my stance; organic growing methods are often equally or more harmful to humans than conventional methods. Sure, organic practices can be better for the soil, but I am a firm believer that they have little to no effect on human health, and that they produce far less food for a higher cost economically and environmentally.
But that's a topic for another post.
So, seeing that there was a demand for organically grown vegetable seedlings in the area, I decided to start my little "business". I set up a Facebook page and started taking early orders and upfront payments for seedlings in order to cover the startup costs. I bought my [untreated, non GMO] seeds, my organic seed starting mix, pots, and labels. At this point, it was still February and there was no way I could start this huge quantity of seedlings in my parents' living room. I needed a greenhouse.
I started looking online for the cheapest greenhouses I could find. Eventually, I decided that in order to get the space I was needing, I'd have to build one. My dad and I found these plans and slightly modified them for our needs. The end result was a 12x24 foot hoop house with solid end walls, roll-up sides, heated with this heater. It worked incredibly well for its purpose, as long as I remembered to shut off the heater during the day (it did hit close to 100 degrees in there during sunny days, even in February if the heater was on). My gramps built me some simple greenhouse benches and a potting bench. The total cost came out to somewhere around $800, with the most expensive pieces being the PVC and the covering. I'll post pictures of our build in another post if you guys want.
By mid May (I think last frost date for my area was May 15th) I had seedlings big enough to sell. Unfortunately, many of them hadn't germinated. I mostly had problems with my herbs. I think I ended up with something ridiculously low, like ten percent germination across all my herbs. I had even planned ahead and planted 25% extra of everything, just in case. I ended up having to reimburse a lot of people who had paid back in February. Fortunately, many of them were family and generously refused the refund, which helped to cover the reimbursement for other customers.
Through this experience, I did learn a lot.
1. I learned to advertise a product using social media.
2. I learned to be honest and communicate with customers.
3. Don't count your seedlings before they germinate.
4. I came to the conclusion that I am much happier growing for myself, rather than growing what/how others want me to grow.
If you want to check out what I had and see a few pictures of the setup, here is the Facebook page I made for my little endeavor. Now that I've moved out, my dad is using the greenhouse to grow tomatoes. He replaced the benches with raised beds. I haven't seen them in person yet, but they look great in pictures and I can't wait to see how it turns out!
-Rose
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