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You Can Easily Save AND Make Money...
Growing Your Own FREE Plants! Producing LARGER Yields! BY PROPAGATING, or "CLONING" Plants You Already Have! |
| With so many benefits to propagating your own plants, it's hard to imagine any gardener who doesn't take advantage of this wonderful technique for reproducing your best garden varieties, landscape stock and favorite houseplants. |  |
| Aside from the obvious benefit of being able to produce hundreds of genetically identical clones of your favorite plants, many other benefits await the grower who propagates their own plants. Most cloned plants grow faster than their source, or "mother", plant, and with a shorter internodal length (space between branches), which produces more fruiting and flowering sites resulting in larger yields and more blooms per plant. |
| No Pain... Great Gains! While propagating your own plants used to be an activity reserved for only the most advanced master gardeners, new research and developments in technology have brought this once challenging endeavor into the realm of do-it-yourselfers. Rooting powders used to be the only tool a home gardener had available to help in the reproduction of plants. Today, science and engineering have created dozens of methods and products that enable even an elementary school student to successfully duplicate plants with ease. |
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| Newer, more powerful rooting hormones, blended in gel-based formulations that keep the active ingredients right where the roots develop while sealing the cut, provide new plant cuttings with a virtually 100 percent chance of success. With standard rooting powders, a certain percentage of cuttings were assumed to fail. In order for a grower to end up with 100 successful cuttings, he often had to cut many more to achieve that goal. Other new propagation products include commercial duty bottom heat mats, used to speed up seed germination and root development in cuttings by professional greenhouses, are now widely available in heavy-duty versions for the consumer, proving far more safe and effective than old style heating cables. |
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Premium quality seedling nutrient supplements, designed specifically for promoting tender root growth, are available in a number of different formalations, both organic and inorganic. These finely tuned fertilizers provide tender seedlings with precise quantities of the vitamins, hormones, and nutrients that are most important to plant development during their early, formative stages of growth.
New beneficial biostimulants such as mycorrhizal inoculants have been discovered that cause an expansive increase in the number of fine hair roots that a plant uses to take up food and water, which results in not only greater propagation success rates, but overall faster plant growth and larger yields. Growing media designed specifically for plant propagation is now available as well, which greatly improves success rates and in many cases is easier and much cleaner to use. Foam rooting and seed starting cubes; natural, foam, and stonewool based plugs; fine vermiculites; and coco peat are just a few examples. Sterile and pH neutral, these exciting new mediums have excellent air to water ratios, a primary factor responsible for their superior characteristics and success. Some of these new media even incorporate |
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| small amounts of a complete and balanced starter fertilzer to facilitate higher success rates. |
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Other new propagation products include plant propagating systems, kits and media that can root from dozens to hundreds of cuttings in a very short period of time, with very little effort. The process is simple, take cuttings of your favorite plants, dip them into a gel-based rooting hormone, and stick them into the media or propagation rooting system.
Propagation rooting systems super aerate the water and nutrients which speed up rooting times significantly, and are especially suited for rooting hard and semi-hardwoods and other slow-to-root varieties. Many integrate a reusable collar that completely eliminates the need for a rooting media, which can offer significant cost savings to the prolific propagator. Once the roots have developed, the plants can be immediately transplanted into the growing area or container. |
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Money Can Grow... On Plants!
Purchasing landscape plants can be very expensive, especially when purchasing multiples of the same variety for mass planting and larger landscaping needs. You can literally save thousands of dollars by propagating landscape plants you or your neighbors already have or by buying a single speciman and reproducing it yourself. If you spend $20 for a single speciman, think of the potential savings you can realize by propagating a virtually unlimited number of duplicates yourself! |
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Another benefit that should give you reason to consider duplicating your landscape, house and garden plants is supplementing your income. Tens of thousands of backyard growers are not only saving money by growing their own plants, they're making money by selling their excess stock at farmers markets, garden centers, even on their driveway or a picnic table set up in front of their house!
Not only do people love plants, greenhouses love them as well. Greenhouse growers often purchase their starter plants as rooted cuttings from smaller growers and propagators. They especially like plants from smaller growers, |
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| as they realize that the quality of young plants they purchase are going to be better because smaller growers tend to take better care of their investment. Make Serious Money With Your Favorite Hobby! Mike McGroarty owns a 1/2 acre nursery in suburban Ohio. Well, actually, the "nursery" is his yard! And to be truthful, he only uses 1/10th of the 1/2 acre to grow the plants he sells. Mike has beautifully landscaped his yard, which contains most of his stock plants that he uses to make clones, or duplicates, which he sells on his driveway each spring. But what surprises most people is the fact that not only does Mike make money selling his cuttings, virtually every plant that he has purchased for his landscape is completely tax-deductible as a business expense since he uses them to create new plants which he then sells. His garden tools, containers, soils, etc... all tax-deductible; all business expenses. |
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| Mike sells his plants right on his driveway each spring. The photo below left was taken on April 23rd, the day before their ad in the local newspaper appeared. The photo below right was taken on May 18th, less than a month after the newspaper ad. During this short period, Mike grossed over $25,000 selling small rooted cuttings for about $5.00 a plant, except towards the end of his sale when he reduced the price to $4.00 a plant since the selection was so picked over. |
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| But here's the best part. Because Mike propagated all of his plants from existing plants in his yard, his total cost per plant that he sold for 5 dollars each, which includes the pot, soil, and newspaper advertisements, was 25 cents. Net profit, not including his labor (actually, the labor of his family, since everyone chips in and helps), is a whopping $4.75 each, which equates to over $23,000.00. And Mike further points out, that if he had chosen to grow some of those plants into larger specimens for future years, he could have sold them for as much as $25.00 each, and even greater profit potential. Anyone with a little extra space in their yard can make money like Mike McGroarty does. The demand for home landscape plants is only going to increase, especially with rising energy prices that will force people to look to their own backyards as their weekend destination. And you don't necessarily have to do it on the same scale as Mike. A smaller venture can still net you a significant sum of money for a negligible investment, money that everyone can put to good use. For more information on how you can create a backyard nursery like Mike's, visit his website at FreePlants.com. |
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Plant Propagation Products & Sources Rooting Systems, Kits, Hormones, Gels, Nutrients, Supplements, & More |
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