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You are here: Home / Business / Backyard Nursery / Can You Make $100,000 From Yard Waste?

Can You Make $100,000 From Yard Waste?

Updated : June 17, 2024

9 Comments

Can you REALLY make $100,000.00 from yard waste?? Sounds like one of those bogus get-rich-quick scams, right? I’m sure I’ll catch some flack for even suggesting it’s possible. But guess what… I don’t care. Before I dive into that, I wanna let you know what’s been going on at my nursery.

We just finished up our third weekend of plant sales. Hundreds and hundreds of avid plant buyers have come and gone, packing their cars full of $5.97 plants. It’s really a fascinating thing! But this coming weekend will be our last sale of the Spring.

Here’s why…

We’re in the midst of the “Summertime Propagation Season” here in northeastern Ohio. Over the next month or two, we’ll be working our tails off making as many baby plants as we possibly can. We’ll spend all day clipping, stripping, dipping, and sticking thousands and thousands of cuttings.

Each one of those cuttings will turn into beautiful plants that we will sell for $5.97 each! Kinda amazing, really!

What most people consider to be “Yard Waste”, I see as the best short-term investment you could ever make!

I’m serious about that. Hear me out.

Most people trim the shrubs around their house, rake the clippings into a pile, and toss ’em into the compost bin.

Not me! I’ve purposely planted, what I call “Stock Plants”, all around my nursery. And during the months of June, July, and August, I’ll harvest thousands and thousands of cuttings from those plants.

Each year, the number of cuttings I get from each “Stock Plant” increases as the plant continues to grow… resulting in an endless supply of cuttings.

Now, don’t get me wrong… I’m not saying this is like free money. There IS a cost involved to turn a cutting into a plant that can be sold for $5.97. But… the cost is minimal. On the high side, it costs no more than $0.50 per plant.

$0.50 includes the following for each plant:

  • $0.12 for potting soil (I just calculated again based on the soil recipe I’m currently using)
  • $0.31 for the plastic nursery container (that’s your cost if you buy 1,000 from me… my cost is less than that)
  • $0.06 for the fertilizer

That’s it.

Now, you might be wondering… what about the stock plants? Those cost money!

True, but here’s how to eliminate the cost of all of your stock plants, read carefully:

To get your “Stock Plant Inventory” going, you can start out by buying some liners (a liner is a rooted cutting that has been grown out for one season after it is rooted).

If you go to a wholesale nursery to buy liners, you’ll be required to meet their minimum order size. That’s typically $500 or more.

But inside the Backyard Grower’s Business Center you can snatch up liners at wholesale prices with little to no minimums whatsoever! Sometimes you might be required to order a minimum of 10 plants. You can take a 30-day test drive of the Business Center here for only $7.00.

You can take the test drive, get in there and grab up all the stock plants you need, and cancel after 30 days if you want. Although, I seriously doubt you’ll want to cancel after you’ve seen what’s inside!

Inside the Business Center, liners cost as little as $0.65! I’ve bought liners from members of the Business Center, potted them up, and turned around and sold them $5.97!

So, lets say you join the Business Center for $7.00. You get in there and buy 10 Lynwood Gold Forsythia for $0.65 each. A few days later your liners arrive in the mail (or by UPS), packaged up all nice and neat. You immediately pot 8 of them up, snap a few pictures of them, and list them for sale on Craigslist for $5.97 each.

A few hours later, someone contacts you from your Craigslist ad and wants to buy them all! Trust me, this happens all the time! People can’t believe they can get such beautiful plants for $5.97 and they snatch them up by the handfuls!

So, lets calculate how much you’ve spent and how much you’ve made so far.

You paid $7.00 for a 30-day test drive to the Backyard Grower’s Business Center.

You bought 10 Lynwood Gold forsythia for $0.65 each (plus an estimate of $15.00 for shipping – which is probably a high estimate).

You have $0.50 a piece for the pot, soil, and fertilizer for the 8 liners that you potted up.

And…

You made $5.97 a piece when you sold those 8 potted liners on Craigslist. Here’s how that totals up…

Total Cost = -$32.50

Total Earnings = +$47.76

Total Profit = +$15.26

But WAIT!

You still have 2 Lynwood Gold Forsythia liners left over. What should you do with those?

You should plant them around your house or out in the yard. Now you have your first two Stock Plants! And it cost you nothing! (Be sure to keep the tag that came with it so you know the plant variety. That’s important if you want to take cuttings from it later.)

Okay, so where does the “$100,000.00 from yard waste” thingy come in, Mike??

Stay with me, I’ll connect the dots for you shortly. It all comes down to math.

The more cuttings you stick (most people call cuttings yard waste), the more rooted cuttings you have to pot up, the more plants you have to sell for $5.97. So, it all comes back to how many cuttings you stick.

Like I said at the beginning of this rather lengthy email, this summer we’ll stick thousands and thousands of cuttings.

Like you see on this page, we can stick around 26,000 cuttings at one time.

Rooted Cuttings Waiting To Be Potted Up

Will they all survive? Absolutely not. You’ll always lose some for one reason or another. It’s just the way it is. But hey, it doesn’t cost you anything to stick a cutting, right?

So, conservatively, lets say 65% of the cuttings I stick survive. That’s 16,900 rooted cuttings, out of 26,000, that I can pot up and sell for $5.97 each.

Now, lets do some math…

16,900 x $5.97 = $100,893.00. Is that right?? Yep. Just double-checked.

Then it just comes down to selling them. That’s the easy part! People love buying small plants at these prices. I have an intensive 3-part blog post series on How to Sell the Plants You Grow that will help you out.

But let me tell you the REAL secret that makes all of this possible… it’s my Automated Plant Propagation Kit. Without this thing, none of this would be possible for me.

There’s no way I could ever root this many cuttings at one time if I had to manually water them. It just wouldn’t happen.

Softwood cuttings need to stay moist. If they’re moist, they will produce roots as fast as nature will let them. If they don’t stay moist, they’re toast.

That’s why, after years of propagating my cuttings this way, I decided to put together a kit and make it available to other growers.

But I’ll warn you…

These parts are NOT easy to come by. It takes me months to get them in and quantities are EXTREMELY limited. I’m not kidding.

So, here’s the deal…

If you’re at all interested in getting started in this business… there’s not a better time than RIGHT NOW.

And, there isn’t a better way to do it than with softwood cuttings under automated mist.

I have some Automated Plant Propagation Kits available today for $297.00 but quantities are very limited.

Click here to read more about the system and what’s included (you can order a kit on this page).

I wish you the best of luck and happy growing! Go make some baby plants!

Take a gander at these posts...

  • Growing Japanese Maples
  • It’s time to Make Baby Plants! Make Baby Plants! Make Baby Plants!
  • The Amazing Multiplication Effect & How To Heal In Your Plants
  • Heeling In Plants
  • Messages like this Bring Tears to My Eyes.

Comments

  1. Marshall Reagan says

    August 11, 2018 at 5:07 pm

    Mike do I have to have a plant license to sell plant liners & if so how do I get one?

    Reply
    • Mike says

      August 12, 2018 at 6:48 pm

      Marshall,

      Yes, you do have to be licensed by your state dept of Agriculture to sell plants.

      Reply
  2. Maria says

    October 11, 2015 at 6:29 am

    Hi Mike,
    what can we grow in #3 area? it seems to be too cold to grow much.

    Reply
    • Mike says

      October 11, 2015 at 8:49 am

      Maria,

      People in zone 3 need beautiful plants just like any other place in the country. All you have to do is concentrate on things that are hardy in zone 3 and forget about things that don’t do well there. Typically the garden centers in your are are stocking things that do well in your zone. The plant propagation techniques are the very same that I use here in zone 5. And in every community there is always a market for small plants that people can buy for a little less than garden center prices. More about what we do here. http://freeplants.com/wanted.htm

      Reply
  3. Roger Blair says

    September 2, 2015 at 7:37 pm

    We are looking for a fund raising project to do at our school. We are a Christian private school and I have been a subscriber to your blog for a few years. I believe this sales of plants would be a great way for the students to learn about gardening and at the same time fulfill our needs as a fund raiser. I will be talking to the other people at the school and preparing to do this for the spring. Thanks for the idea,

    Reply
  4. Larry Jarrett says

    August 7, 2015 at 8:18 pm

    I live in Tucson Az. Can I grow these plants here? or do you have plants you could recommend to grow here Zone 8/ 9

    Reply
    • Mike says

      August 8, 2015 at 6:18 am

      Larry,

      We have a number of members in zones 8 and 9 that do very well but exactly what they grow? I’m really not the person to ask, I honestly don’t know. But inside of our members area there are plenty of people that know.

      Reply
  5. louis williamson says

    August 7, 2015 at 6:51 pm

    hi can we just buy 500 cuttings with out being a member thanks Louis

    Reply
    • Mike says

      August 8, 2015 at 6:20 am

      Louis,

      No, the only way you can communicate with our members is to at least test drive the members area, The Backyard Growers Business Center. Our Backyard Growers Members area is awesome! Learn all about it here:
      http://backyardgrowers.com/join

      Reply

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