I’ve had a request to start the series on starting a small nursery so here it is. I plan to write this series with all of it’s warts just the way I got started in the nursery business. As you know by now I am not afraid to do just about anything as far as business goes. I didn’t used to be that way. As a machinist I was a very quiet  9 to 5 person that went along to get along. Boy has that changed. The nursery industry has changed my life completely. I used to wonder how to get some overtime so that we could take the next vacation. Seems like that’s all there was to work for. Raise our daughter,Amy and work toward a chance to get out of town for a few days.

Being a machinist I was used to getting laid off about once a year so there was never a real chance to get ahead. Then my former wife went to work in a huge wholesale nursery. She worked there part time a few days a week for about 5 months. After a few weeks she started bring home some of the plants they would throw out that weren’t good enough to ship to their customers (yes there was a time when you only shipped out your best,imagine that). This stuff started piling up and I went out to help move it from place to place every other day. Then I spotted some carnations she had brought home. That’s where it all started for me. I love the smell of a real carnation. I pampered these plants pruned the dead off of them fertilized them and smelled them,a lot. I got to the point that I couldn’t wait to get home to mess with all the plants in the back yard. Long story short, by the end of the first summer we had a flowering basket hanging from every rafter tail on our house, front and back both. We had scraped up enough for a small down payment on a 10 acre piece of property in Long Beach Wa. we though it would be a great place to go on weekends and there was a small old rental house on the property to make the payments. Well within 6 months I had gotten laid off again and we decided we would move to the beach and try our hands at a nursery. We had a combined total of about 7 months of plant experience how could this idea not work?

It did. More Tomorrow.