The pandemic has taught many of us that the ability to earn money and make good investments is not limited to the possibility of leaving the house. In fact, your next big investment could just be a few steps from your home. Your home garden has so much potential in helping you earn extra income.
Your gardening skills can be put to use in order to drive more income into your household. It will not require too much extra effort on your part to get it started. Earning money from your home garden just needs a good strategy and a few extra seedlings.
Prepare Your Yard for Gardening
Before anything else, your garden has to be prepared for your increased volume of crops. If you have bare patches of land in the garden, cover them with some quality topsoil so that they can recover and be useful.
If you already do your own gardening, chances are you won’t need too many instructions on how to prepare your yard for it. The planning now comes in understanding and mapping out space for the increased volume of what you have to plant. You have to make sure there is enough space in your designated areas to accommodate orders and your own stock.
Grow and Sell Your Own Produce and Crops
The most obvious means to make money off of your gardening hobby is to sell your fresh produce. To start out, choose to grow vegetables and other plants that you already have. As you become more accustomed to the habit of selling your crops, you can ease into broadening the products in your vegetable garden.
If you aren’t sure which vegetables are the most profitable, the Produce Marketing Association has a 2019 report that reveals potatoes as the most purchased vegetable in the United States. Coming in second and third respectively are tomatoes and onions.
For fruits, bananas and apples are the most popular products with 69% of votes from consumers. Then, strawberries are the third most purchased fruit after these.
Let these statistics be your guide in knowing which to grow in a larger volume in your garden. This allows you to space out and divide your area as needed.
Pot Some Plants
While fresh produce is the most popular choice for monetizing your garden, there are other ways to do so. You can also pot plants and sell them.
If you have more area in your garden, start a succulent garden, too. They require little maintenance: just a few leaves from an old succulent plant and a plate with some soil to start. They also don’t need daily water and sunlight to grow.
When they have a fuller shape and grow more leaves, place them in pots and keep them growing for a little while more until they’re in the ideal size for selling. Succulents are good to partner with your produce business, as they don’t need as much attention as other crops.
Create Homemade Items
There is also the possibility of making new things out of your raw materials. These can be sold as homemade products.
If you grow herbs such as mint and chamomile, you can dry these and package them for sale. Camellia sinensis, or the tea plant, is used to produce tea leaves that will be the base for caffeinated teas such as green tea and black tea. You can dry them, too, and package.
Tip: Store your tea leaves in airtight containers to increase their shelf life.
Herbs and tea plants don’t require a large plot of land to grow. You can keep them in pots or planters at home.
Offer Your Services
The many skills you have learned from tending to your garden can become a service you can offer to interested neighbors and friends, or as a full-service business. These can be small activities such as lawn mowing and trimming bushes and as big as developing a plan for another household’s home garden.
Document It
One free and simple way to immortalize your gardening journey and increase its potential for earning is to start a gardening blog or open your own gardening page on a platform such as Instagram. By doing so, you cater to a niche market and build your own professional network of gardening enthusiasts.
When your gardening blog and/or social media pages gain more traction, brands can sponsor products for reviews and promo posts. They can also pay to post ads on your website.
Your own home garden presents you with vast opportunities for creating a brand-new source of income. See how you can expand your garden today to make a great investment from it.
