I am a newbie and I am just starting to realize the "abundance" and "flexibility" built into this WS thing. To have so many containers FULL of sprouts of expensive perennials (if purchased) is to feel like a millionare! I love not "rationing out the groupings" - when I only could afford 6 nursery pots of something, I'd put 3 here and 3 way over there but not now! I have nice large masses of a dozen HOS for foxglove, larkspur, blanket flower, verbena, salvia, more - it's amazing! And although I'm not up to it yet (still being in year one), I can imagine feeling quite OK just pulling out something that didn't work cause I have so many others. Here's the other thing I am growing to appreciate - - I have so much that I can put in NOW, before the weeds take over! I use to try to leave spaces, figuring I'd buy plants to fill them but then my abiltiy to do that couldn't keep up with the weeds coming in. Even though the HOS are still little, I can see what their "space" will be and hoe out all the weeds/volunteers around them with confidence. I use to be reluctant to hoe out anything green until I was absolutely sure it wasn't a "volunteer" of some kind that I might want. But by that time the weeds (always 10x more weeds than volunteers) were 6 inches high and harder to get out! Nancy

You should inspect the trunk and near the root flare closely to be sure there is no damage (or very little). I would hope that the nursery wouldn't sell you a tree with a disease (such as one infected with ambrosia...you may want to read up on this as it is becoming more of a problem in the trade). I would say that choosing a tree with a central leader is always a good idea, especially since this is a cross between red and silver maples. A silver maple would be of much more concern here, but it definetely wouldn't hurt to avoid narrow crotches. Other than that, just pick a nice looking tree with a good shape and you should be fine.

I have a growing garden at home (I've only lived here for 5 years) so I am constantly buying and planting new plants for the yard. My goal is to turn my yard into a showcase garden and offer garden craft workshops on weekends (it will take me another 5 years to get there). So most of the plants I sell are either cuttings from my garden or extra seedlings left over after I planted my garden. My customers really seem to like that these are plants from my yard and not from a greenhouse down south (meaning Florida, which is where a lot of plants around here come from). I get seeds from all sorts of sources. For really unusuall seedlings I often get the seed by trading with other gardeners. I host plant swaps and seed swaps throughout the year and people are always giving me precious rarities as a reward for organizing the events (worth all the trouble). Some of these people enjoy the swaps so much that they basically shop for me during the year - they know what plants I collect and which species I am looking for. Sometimes they expect me to pay them for it but most often they seem to enjoy finding and giving me a gift plant for free. One other special thing about this area is that there are a few specialty nurseries in the area that have some of the most unusuall plants around (Plant Delights Nursery, Niche Gardens, Camellia Forest). So if I need something really special I don't have to go very far to get it. But, having these larger more established nurseries in the area also makes it hard for me to offer anything special. Keep in mind that because I grow in such small numbers I don't really need large quantities of seed. There are market gardeners that can go to a festival or market and sell entire flats of herbs (the same type of herb). I have never been able to do that. I might sell a lot of something but I've never been able to sell an entire flat. Now I do get other vendors that want to buy an entire flat at a reduced price, I decline, I'm not a wholesaler, it screws up my profit margins to sell things so cheaply. You might find that your market will buy in those volumes. More than likely your market will shift in its buying habits from season to season. So how many basil seedlings you can sell in the spring will be different than how many you can sell in the summer and you will have to take all that data into account to determine the price you need for each plant. At my market it would hurt sales to have a spring price and a summer price - its the same customers every weekend, they will notice the difference and complain. My truck can haul around 300 plants (a little more if they are mostly seedlings, a lot less if they are mostly gallons). So I have to make my money selling 100 plants. With an average price of $2 per plant I'm making $200 on plants. On an average day I can sell $50 of crafts (bird feeders, decorated pots). Though I sell fewer of them they cost me less to make and store. With the seedlings I have to sell them quick or they will grow to big and leggy (remember my yard is mostly shade) and no one will want them. My biggest selling item isn't a homemade craft or a plant - it's decorative rock glass. Rock glass is the waste product of glass factories - old molten glass is left to cool and thrown away. I buy it cheaply and take colorful rocks about the size of a grapefruit or larger and sell them. I don't polish them, I don't clean them, I don't do anything to them and I can sell as many as I want to haul to the market. Now I could just devote my entire enterprise to selling rock glass but that would saturate the market and sales would eventually drop, so I sell a small quantity each weekend and keep the price up. My original plan was to be the flea market vendor devoted to vegetable/herb gardeners in this area. In this region you can garden all year if you want, but most people don't. So my hope is to wean my customers off of petunias and get them growing food crops on a small scale in their own backyards. Veggie seedlings aren't the crowd pleaser that floral crops are and you really can sell more product with a flashy display so I've learned that I have to offer bedding plants. One thing I can do is buy flats of bedding plants at wholesale prices from some of the big box stores or specialty nurseries and grow them up bigger in my yard and sell them for more money. I don't make a lot of profit after spending that much time and effort on them but having some full bloom plants available helps out the display value. I quess what I'm trying to say is that there is money in small scale market growing. It might be specializing in one crop and wholesaling it to area garden centers or it might be retailing it yourself. What I have learned is that the way things are described in books is not necessarily the way it works - at least not in my experience. At the flea market I can make between $75 - $250 per day. At my last part time job I only made $50 per day. If I found an 8 hour weekend job I would only make $80 per day. This way I make more money and I am in control of my weekend. If the weather is bad I stay home and work on crafts. If the weather is good I plan on staying longer at the flea market and selling more. If sales are down I can pack up and go home whenever I want. Many people advise me to move my business to the local farmers market (which is actually closer to my house) but the farmers market doesn't have the volume of customers all year long, and it starts at a rediculous hour of the morning (vendors have to be there at 5am, customers arrive at 6am!!!) and there are 30 other people doing exactly what I am doing. Some of the vendors there only make $20 a day for their efforts. Also, many farmers markets sepparate craft selling from the plant vendors so I would have to only sell plants or crafts not both. hope this helps.

The possibilities are enormous. Focus on plants that look good in winter. Perennials turn faster than trees and shrubs so you might want to consider things like bergenia, various euphorbias, heucheras, hebes, evergreen groundcovers, farfugium, even some grasses or hellebores. One of the biggest draws to retail nurseries during winter in my area are small hardy plants suited for inclusion in container plantings - you might want to do up several display pots to illustrate by example, then sell the plants in them. Small evergreen shrubs and conifers work for this purpose as well and you don't have to grow them on to landscape size.