Fri. September 8th I will have a casual meal and a glass of wine (or two) ready for Friday weary travelers. I have nothing planned for this night as I am not sure who and when people are arriving. Sat. 9th We will be leaving my home at 8:30 am to pickup the 9:00 am arrivals and continue to Polly Hill for our 10:00am Workshop. Please note that I will need one of our group to be a driver. 10:00am to 12:00pm ($24.00) is our workshop if the weather allows we will be doing a picnic lunch at Polly Hill. The lunch will come from the only place in the area it is a catering business and either Friday night you can look at the menu or Sat. prior to the workshop ($10-$12.00??). After a quick lunch at the Polly Hill picnic table there are three nurseries in the area and we will probably have one hour to kill at a nursery at one nursery there is a gentleman who I would consider a rare plant fantatic/collector who is new to the island I have told him about you all and he will let me know if he can talk to us about rare plant collecting and how he moved his collection. Of course there will be time to poke around and make some purchaseshmmm (too many $$). Sadly it is fall and all of the nurseries have relative slim pickens. Back to Polly Hill for our private tour I have told them how brilliant you all are. My guestamate is we will be leaving PH around 3:30 I would like to stop at another nursery, a daylily farm for another talk on not only daylilies but solar power, a glass place where we can watch visiting and local craftsmen blow and see some of the most amazing pieces I have ever seen. I am suggesting this only after having run in the other day to see if they could repair something of mine glass and crafts usually arent my thing but the pieces they had on display were like nothing I have ever seen before and of course with a price to match $33,000.00. There are also a few art galleries as well as Chilmark chocolates that (hard to believe I know) is even better than Ben & Bills. ( All of those suggestions are free unless you choose to purchase) These are a few things available to us on the way to Menemsha a small fishing village where if the weather permits I would like to do what is called "backdoor" which is going to the restaurant/fish markets backdoor and ordering dinner to go (which is usually a cracked lobster and fixings) (I dont recall the cost but I am guessing $20.00-$30.00?) But I am sure they have something for the non fish lover but to be honest I dont know what so you may want to order two sandwiches at lunch. We will then walk over to the beach plunk our tired fannies down and watch to sunset as we eat our lobster. Please keep in mind if you like wine, beer, what ever with your meal these are dry towns and you will need to have brought that with you in the am. Also keep in mind it will be chilly so bring many more layers than you think you should. It will be much better to have a pile of sweaters and jackets in to trunk of the car than shivering unhappy people far from the warmth of my home. Now if as they are forecasting it will be raining and miserable I will have a plan B which will include dinner at a restaurant unless the majority of us would rather pitch in to buy and prepare a meal at my house. I dont know how to keep everyone comfortable with the decisions other than majority rule so please come prepared to spend twice as much as you thought you would. After the sunsets I thought we would head back to down town Edgartown for ice cream, wine what ever and of course at this point some or all could just go back and collapse. Sunday September 10th Wake up and bike, walk, ride to a private garden designed by Christine Horiunchi a Cape Landscape architect who has won awards for this design. With coffee in hand lets talk about design and plants, what she chose, what you would have chosen. Continue down the road to a grass airport where we will stop for more coffee and breakfast while watching vintage planes take off and land. We will also be viewing one of the last great stretches of Sand plain with rare native wildflowers. For those who need to catch a noon boat that should have you on the road by 1:30pm it would be time to say goodbye. For those that can stay a bit longer we have other choices, When picking the brain of people from Polly Hill for what else to include in this weekend they all suggested we drive down the beach to chappy and visit the My Toi gardens, or head back to down town Edgartown to do a walking tour of town and check out village gardens as well as another nursery visit, or maybe? My feeling is that the late group probably wont want to depart any later than a 3:00pm boat which would have you on the road by 4:30pm. A number of things that we will be doing are dependant on weather so we may be making adjustments to any and all that I have suggested. Please if something is important to you speak up I would want to know that and will try my best. I look forward to meeting you all and dont hesitate to write or call. Let me know at your earliest when you expect to be arriving. kt

I really think it sad when you commented on people making nasty, sarcastic comments when posters ask for advise. I don't think it is the norm on this forum, especially compared to many others. Those most willing to help will often be the growers who have been in it for the long haul and most I know enjoy mentoring those who follow in the same footsteps. You've already read other posts about starting up 'backyard' nurseries. Don't confuse honest replies with sarcasm. Even if those replies you receive are not what you want to hear. OK? First of all, I don't know what your vision is. I'm picking up that you'd like to grow with your business as it grows and not put a lot of expenditures into it before the fact. That's not a bad idea because you shall be modifying your goals and plans depending on your successes or lack of them First off, 200 square feet is miniscule for starting a plant business, especially if you are starting off with very common plants everyone else is selling. Your profit is based on what is left over after your costs and you'd be surprised on common bedding plants just how low the return on the dollar can be. They were my 'filler' crops I used to occupy bench space when those specialty crops with a high return on investments weren't filling them. I had to heat half a g'house of pricey crops anyway, so I grew them so the heated space with a constant $ amount of overhead wouldn't be a total waste. If you do grow the 'common crops' then you might want to specialise somehow like offering them already planted in urns or specialty pots. You will not, no way compete with mass producers doing that unless you plan to mass produce and you can't do that without a big up-front investment and mucho moola. Say you don't agree and do it anyway. Say you're making a decent profit on each pot and flat. Good on you........but consider you have a very small inventory and even at top dollar, you will only reap a very small return. You operation has to be at least large enough to make it worth your overhead and time. Since you say that most of the impatiens, marigold and geraniums you see are used in pots, you may want to offer a pot planting service yourself. I used to do a good number of special order pot fills where they'd drop them off, and I'd fill them up and all they had to do was take them home and display them. It's very difficult to use ecologically responsible packaging. It's more expensive and you have to pass that expense along with higher prices. That's something the marigold crowd usually doesn't understand. They're also harder to work with than plastics requiring more bench space and better aeration because the rigid support often collapses over time. You may be able to pitch to the 'green' crowd and pick up customers who don't mind field grown mums or tomato starts wrapped in recycled newspapers. It could be one approach. You can use recycled plastics, reused containers. Again, using old containers will turn some of your consumers off, and it can if not done responsibly introduce diseases. You will be faced with minumum orders sizes for the amount of plants you are going to be buying. IOW you may have to order more geranium cuttings than a 200 sq ft. g'house can accomodate. My suggestion is to partner with another small growers and consolidate your orders to fill the mins. I order my geranium cuttings in anywhere from Mid february to early march, depending on the size pot I wish to place them. That brings us to the heating issue. It was one of my biggest expenses. You'll have to consider it one of your's as well because you'll be running that g'house four months before you make your first sale. If you do things like marigolds, you'll have to consider their day length requirements. Some are day neutral and some aren't. Your greenhouse enviroment will also play greatly in to how long it takes to produce them. You'll find data available, but that is assuming you are heating at optimal levels, and not just keeping them from freezing. For a beginning grower, ordering plugs are much more reliable because it cuts down on your production time and you can order them in any stage you wish, from just sprouted to big enough to bloom I have always recommended people before they ever strike out on their own to have some experience in the business. You are going to need it to produce a good crop realiably and gaining it may as well be on somebody else's nickle. What you want to do isn't impossible, and it sounds like mostly a hobby operation at this point. Just go slowly and don't get in over your head. If you have been selling stuff from a camper, just be aware that you are also obliged to do things like collect sales taxes, and if you are selling perennials you are probably also required to have connections with your state's agricultural departments for inspection at some point. Jumping from a hobby to a money making venture is a legal line in the sand and don't cross it unless you are willing to do it by the book. The penalties are stiff and just not worth it.

Wow this thread has been ages hahaha but anyway i just wanted to share cause i also want answers. Hopefully someone has a good theory about it. I have a closed terrarium/vivarium that i tried or shall i say experimented. It looks interesting cause I tried building it on a 3 liter glass container. I learned a little about creating it but i would say i dont have any background of biology or other sciences. So i piled the largest pebbles that could fit to the container's mouth that has a hole of an inch. The height of the pebbles from the very bottom is around an inch. Next to the pile is white sand that i dried up from a beach for half an inch, next to that are colorful beeds-mixed red and yellow to make it colorful if u look at it from the outside. Thats half an inch as well. Next is clay soil for half an inch, then pounded charcoal for half an inch. I heard that charcoal could clean the air or stabilize the atmosphere inside this but im not very sure of it. Hahaha Lastly, is a pile of loam soil which is ideal for the plants to grow. I planted moss which i got from the bark of a mango tree, a few fern, and few grass that only grow around 1/2 inch. Poured 5 tbsp of rainwater. Apparently its close and it can get enough sunlight to suntain its life. Its 11 months now and never been opened. It looks healthy cause the water does its cycle inside the bottle like the rain. And u know what? The interesting part is, i saw really tiny insect and a spider that came to life. BDW i didnt put anything in it. Do u think that was just normal or was it just part of the life cycle inside the bottle? Hahaha

I officially hung up my pipe wrenches and retired on New Years day 2006. At the time my game plan was to go aboard my 36' houseboat for a two to three month cruise then return and build a tiny little one bedroom retirement home that looks like an English gate keepers cottage that I had been designing and dreaming about for the last ten or so years. So much for long term plans...LOL. I have had so much fun on the boat I don't anticipate ever building another house. So far i have cruised the Ohio river from Pittsburg to Cairo, Ill, Un the Mississippi to the Illinois then up to the Chicago sanitary ship canal to Chicago, then back downstream to New Orleans, turning west on the Intercoastal waterway all the way to Brownsville, Texas and back to Ohio, and next summer we plan to circumnavigate the entire east coast of the USA. Mississippi River to chicago,,across the great lakes to New York, Erie canal and Hudson River to NYC then the coastal waters to southern NJ where we will take the Intercoastal waterway around florida to New Orleans and up the Mississippe river and Ohio river back to our starting point. When we feel in a festive mood we can go down river about 40 miles from our home marina and tie up to a casino boat for a day or two. When solitude is in order we anchor in a quiet cove in a wilderness section of the river where i can quietly sip my coffee and watch deer, bear and other wildlife come to the river for water. When we are tied up in a marina and must make those obligotory pilgrimages to walmart we have a motor scooter on the stern deck that we can set off. Laugh if you will but it gets 60mpg at 50mph with two ppl so it is fine for us. The boat is totally self contained with a 20KVA generator, a marine geothermal HVAC system plus we can heat the boat with circulating hot water generated by the engines when we are cruising. (the same method as a car heater). Full size LP gas range and oven in the galley, plus microwave and all the other non-sensical trappings of a full kitchen. Two bedrooms with queen size beds plus the galley can be converted to sleeping berths when we have extra ppl on board. (We can actually sleep 10 ppl comfortably.) The Head (bathroom) is a bit small but it has all the required amenities,tub/shower, toilet, vanity etc. About the only thing we don't have that we might have in a new house is a mortage and utility bills..LOL.