Dave Bross

Single best resource and most accurate description of what it's like to be in the nursery business....ever.

This will open your eyes. It convinced me not to ever do that, even though there's a family history of owning nurseries.

The book is:

So You Want to Start a Nursery  - by Tony Avent

If you still want to do it:

Another good resource would be all the backyard nursery videos from Mike McGroarty on youtube. There's a LOT of excellent info in those vids.
That info is not slanted towards food production, it's about ornamental stuff, but most of the info applies to food plants/shrubs/trees also.

Mike's always pushing/selling a bit hard to join his membership, but, if you do decide to take the plunge into a nursery biz that would be a very valuable resource.

Mike himself has been working in/owning nurseries since he was a kid so he has incredible knowledge on the easiest way to do things.

The membership is $600 last time I checked.
That gives access to a buy sell forum where you can buy liner plants (rooted starter plants) for incredibly low prices.
There's also a forum there for questions and answers from fellow nursery operators.

The other reason I never started a for profit nursery is that there are a ton of other nurseries locally and they sell stuff for peanuts.

Do check for a similar situation around you as part of your decision research.

This guy has been working for and then owning nurseries since he was a kid.

Scroll down here to the info on potting soil. I've done what he suggests for many years and it works great.

I re-use all my potting soil, adding more pine bark as the bark in the mix decomposes over 4 - 5 years.


https://mikesbackyardnursery.com/2014/12/mike-mcgroartys-secret-bed-building-and-potting-soil-recipe/

As mentioned, winter rye grass might work.

Cowpeas also. The ones in the grocery stores often sprout and grow just fine.
Black eye peas and conch peas are extra tansy cowpea varieties here.

Reading descriptions here may turn something up. I've bought cover crop seed from them before and they're good folks.

https://petcherseeds.com

I would check the well water and soil for toxic ag chemicals and metals on any property ever used for commercial ag.

Trust...but verify.

Thanks for the pic of the Universal food grinder.

My dad was one of the vice presidents of Landers Frary and Clark 1940s early 50s.

They were a very old manufacturer of appliances...starting back with appliances that were  pre electricity like the Universal grinder.

They made a lot of manual coffee grinders too.

I remember one of those Universal grinders sitting in the kitchen cabinets forever.

Unfortunately, they made a number of bad decisions with the flush of cash they got from military contracts in WW2 and went down the drain a few years later.

They were a classic US manufacturer, with their own in house foundries, machine shops, sheet metal shops and the like.

Everything they sold was manufactured in-house.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landers,_Frary_%26_Clark

https://connecticutmills.org/find/details/landers-frary-and-clark


Edit - someone sent me a news clip where the remaining Landers factory buildings are being converted to affordable housing. Love that.

Ooooh boy, just like my struggles to use billboard tarps as end doors on my military truck maintenance tent (great big canvas quonset hut ) that's used as my shop.

I finally gave up other than rolling them down in freezes so I can drag frost sensitive stuff into there.

When it's frosty here it's usually no wind.

As far as stopping the sides flapping, the tent came with large hooks  all the way down the sides, like the speed lacing hooks at the top of hiking boots .
It worked to use these and holes punched in the edges of the tarps to lace up the sides against the wind much like you would lace up a shoe. Much work required there every time you do that.
It would make it easier to have put hooks on the tarp also. I did buy some small coat hooks that looked like they might work, but never did try it.

Bigger pulley blocks on the ropes rolling the tarp up and down were a big upgrade.

I'm using the same basic rope lifting  setup illustrated here.
I used a long 2x2 with the tarp stapled to it instead of a pipe as a roller. Pipe would have been better.

Nice description here. Love the updates and "wrecks" too.

Oh yeah, a wind up kitchen timer is one of my best tools too.

For:

Not overfilling the greenhouse reservoirs

Not forgetting to switch or turn off irrigation

The aforementioned cooking escapades, not turning things Cajun...as in blackened

A reminder system for my inevitable flaw of attempting to multi task and forgetting all the other task but the one I have my nose in at the moment

appointments

And on and on....

I carry it around in my pocket when in use...which has led to some humor when friends ask "What's that ticking noise?" and my comments about mad bombers.

One thing to know if you've never used these before.

You have to wind them all the way around then back to the time you're setting.
I hate to admit how long I struggled until I learned this.
No instructions come with the newer ones and the way I found out was an old US made one I got at a yard sale had a sticker on it explaining this

Tradeoffs here.

I eliminate all the conifers because they act as a lightning rod sticking above the canopy and if you don't burn off the pine needles then one dry season day you'll be faced with the hundred foot wall of flame rapidly destroying everything in its path.

The native folk burned off the pine woods regularly to avoid the wall of fiery death and open up the understory for hunting.

Ii sometimes wonder how pine was the dominant species when Florida was first "discovered" by white people...and the answer may be the original natives biased things that way via burning.

In the last few years a large market has opened up here for "pine straw," which is baled pine needles, so that may be one use for the pine needles.
They do make a long lasting mulch, which is spread out enough to minimize fire hazard.

Much like using petroleum, machinery, and plastic, perhaps controlled burning  begins the process, enhances fire safety, and gives you results until you can figure out a better way.

Another perfection may be the enemy of good?

I think being alert to not overextending yourself on timelines for completion is important.

Or, to simplify that, not to not bite off more than you can chew at one time.

Easy to say, but I'm guilty of repeated offenses here.

If you're going to be dumb, you've got to be tough...the perils of excess optimism.

On the lighter side, a major motivation is the ever increasing amount of homegrown foods I get to eat, the visual treat of the increasing greening of my little place, and benefits like watching windbreaks grow into maturity and do their thing..

I'll qualify what I'm going to say ...

I had a glassblowing studio from the late 1990s until the 2007/8 financial crash and did (and sometimes still do) a good bit of work on glass chemistry.
There's even a glass named after me, Brossphate, because I was able to sort the problems glassblowers had forever with getting phosphate glasses to melt smooth without chunks of crystals in the glass. Originally that was overcome with a high percentage of lead. My main desire in going deep on glass chemistry was to eliminate as many toxins like lead as possible.

https://www.davebross.com/GlassTech/whatarefurnacebeads.html

https://www.davebross.com/sitemap.html


Many furnace glassblowers have done production lines with recycled glass but it's difficult to work, requires additives,  and will never be "crystal" pretty as a clear glass.

A LOT of "third world" glassblowers use recycled glass and cooking/drain oil to heat the furnaces and tough it out with the difficult working characteristics.

In spite of all they're working against they make some awesomely creative stuff.

https://www.voanews.com/a/kenyan-company-turns-glass-waste-into-artisanal-products/7936413.html

The sea glass market was flooded years ago and selling it would be difficult.

It takes a LONG time to tumble out a load of glass. I used to finish my furnace glass beads that way and it was tedious.

One of the problems with glass and glass as concrete aggregate and the like is that it will devitrify and become fragile. Glass is sand, alkali and modifier, the modifier being lime, zinc, or a few other things.
If the glass was formulated without enough modifier (not uncommon) the alkali will dissolve out of the glass, leaving a fragile skeleton of silica that will crush easily. That escaped alkali would be a mess in concrete. You could make it work but every batch of glass would have to be tested for possibility of devitrification.

If you try melting glass don't do it in a graphite crucible like one of the vids here. At full melt temps it's likely to foam and boil over. Use clay crucibles which are available from mine supply and assay outfits.

On the positive side, recycled glass can be remelted for utility items a number of times.  The problem is the sheer volume of recycled glass out there.

I worked for a recycling outfit in Seattle in the 1990s and a good bit was able to be used by the Ball canning jar factory there if it was sorted correctly. The rest piled up until they had to landfill it.

The reason plastic took over from glass was shipping weight.

We could do worse than to put deposits back on glass bottles and mandate glass packaging. I think Oregon still does this.

I'm loving all the pics that were posted. Wonderful creativity!