Growing, Selling and Propagating non Patented Heuchera, also known as Coral Bells.

Dollar for dollar Coral Bells, also known as Heuchera is by far one of the best plants you can put in your landscape because they are easy to care for and add year round color to the landscape.  And they can be pricey, I’ve seen one gallons priced as high as $14.00 in a big box store!

Huge Opportunity for You!

In our Members Area People are always looking to buy Heuchera, Coral Bells an there are never enough for sale.  We need people like you to step up and help fill that demand.  For the past two or three years I’ve been buying 1,000 Coral Bells a year from one of our members at $1.70 each!  That’s a $1,700 order from him!

Growing them is actually pretty easy but there’s one itty bitty problem with that idea.  Most of them are patented!  At least that goes for the ones that you see in the retail stores.

Patented?  What in the world does that mean?

Follow along closely, what I am about to tell you is really, really important.

Patented means that a grower somewhere spent a great deal of time effort and even money cross pollinating certain varieties in a controlled environment and developed a new variety.  Some times new varieties are just chance seedlings and one out of 5,000 or more seedlings produced has desirable characteristics that neither of the parent plants had.  Other times the effort to create a new variety is much more deliberate.

In either case, if the grower thinks that they have something truly unique they start propagating their new strain via means of asexual reproduction, cuttings, division or tissue culture, and they have to study the new strain for some time, usually two years or more, to make certain that their new introduction is stable.

By stable I mean that all of the off spring from the new variety show the exact same desirable characteristics as the original.  If in fact the new variety is stable, the grower can then apply for a plant patent.  If the plant patented is granted, a Plant Patent Number is assigned to the new introduction and that means that nobody can legally propagate that new variety without first entering into a legal agreement with the patented holder.

These legal agreements, known as licenses, are difficult to get and expensive to get.  Small growers like us are likely to not be issued such a license and therefore, we cannot propagate patented plants.  And even if we could, we would have to pay the patent holder a royalty on each and every plant that we grew and sold.  It’s complicated and it sorta creates a disadvantage to small growers like us.

But not really.  Follow along.

There are many plants, including many Heuchera, that are not patented.  They are in the public domain and you and I are free to propagate them, grow them and sell them to our hearts content.  That’s a good thing!  They can be a little bit difficult to find because the garden centers are packed full of patented plants.  But they are out there and you can find them!

I’m going to tell you a story about me, one of our members and one particular Coral Bells.

Many years ago I picked up a few Coral Bells to put in my home landscape.  One of those was Coral Bells ‘Snow Angel’, one of the prettiest coral bells that you can find.  Pretty pink flowers, green and white variegated leaves, just flat out beautiful.  And Snow Angel is not patented.

So a few years back I dug up the Snow Angel in my landscape, divided them into many new plants, put a few back in my landscape and I potted and sold all of the divisions in my nursery.  One of our members from here in Ohio came to visit me at the nursery  and bought the last two Snow Angel that I had in the nursery.

Selling my last two plants was dumb!  It’s like selling the Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs!

Months later I realized that I had no Snow Angel to sell and non to propagate from.  So I did what I always do when I’m looking for a particular plant, I went to The Members Area and I asked if anybody had any Snow Angel Coral Bells liners that they would like to sell.  (A liner is a small plant, a bit bigger than a rooted cutting, but still pretty small.)

The very same member that bought my last two Snow Angel Coral Bells spoke up and said she had 80 left that she could sell me.  She bought two plants from me and turned those two plants into hundreds of plants!  She bought my last two plants and later turned around and sold me 80 of the off spring from two plants that used to belong to me.

Learning from my own mistake of selling off my last two Snow Angel, instead of potting the 80 plants that I bought from Tammy I planted them in a bed so I could use them from propagation.  This summer we dug up a few of those plants, tore them to pieces, put them Under the Automatic Plant Propagation System that we use and we now have hundreds rooted and ready to pot from just a few of the plants from my bed of stock plants.

A bed of Snow Angel Coral Bells for propagation.

These plants were tiny when I planted them in the fall and look at how much they filled out in just a matter of months.  I need to add other varieties of non patented Coral Bells to this bed so I can produce an unlimited supply of my own Coral Bells and quit spending $1,700 a year on liners.

This is How We Propagate Them.

Liar, Liar Pants on Fire!

There is no first video!  I seem to have lost it.  Urrrrrrrrg!  I know we shot the video, but I seem to have lost it.  That’s what I get for taking weeks and weeks to get this stuff posted.  I’ll have to shoot another video for you.

Heuchera, Coral Bells pieces and division in the propagation bed.

They look like the dickens don’t they?  Don’t let that concerned you.  They are perennials and they are well rooted  thanks to The Automated Plant Propagation System that we use.  Come spring they’ll be spectacular!

Coral Bells, Heuchera will all kinds of new roots.

Freshly rooted Heuchera, Coral Bells.

Snow Angel Coral Bells just before being sacrificed for propagation.

And this is where you come in.

We are always looking for folks who can grow and produce more and more non patented Coral Bells.  There are a number of non patented varieties that I am aware of, but I know there are more and more and more can be created by experimenting with seedlings.

If this interests you we can discuss it in further detail with the rest of Our Members Inside the Members Area.  There are a lot of things that we are working on in the members area and this is just one of them.  We are in process of identifying and compiling lists of non patented plants that we are all free to propagate.  Those lists are almost endless.

In my opinion, there are some growers with deep pockets who are working to make sure that garden centers only carry patented plants from which they earn a royalty on every plant sold.  In our members area I constantly remind our members that it is up to us to make sure all of these beautiful, non patented plants never go extinct.

That’s my mission in life.  Test Drive the Members Area Today, We’d Love to Have You in Our Family of Backyard Growers.

Questions, comments, mean things to say?  Post them below and I’ll respond appropriately.

P.S. A while back I wrote another article about Growing and Selling Coral Bells.  Check it out, you’ll see some amazing photos.