The kids are all right

A fellow nurseryperson in Missouri posted this photo on her Facebook page. She came home to find some kids that live in the same building decided to construct an aquaponics system in the basement. According to many in our trade, the young just don’t garden like their parents and grandparents did. This has affected the bottom line of many garden centers and nurseries around the world with many going out of business.

If you owned a garden center and some people came in wanting to build an aquaponics system, could you help them? What if they asked about growing lettuce hydroponically? What if they wanted to grow lettuce in soil inside under T5 lights? Where do you send them if you don’t carry this stuff? Why?

What's on the gardening public's mind?

A few post ago we talked about "The Future of Horticultural Businesses is in The Best Sellers List".  It concerned what books are best sellers in the horticulture and garden section at Amazon.com. I said, " as a person who makes their living working with gardeners it’s a signpost for the future as we decide which direction the garden center is to take.

I noticed looking at the list that "Aquaponic Gardening: A Step by Step Guide to Raising Fish and Vegetables Together has been climbing in the list to number 5.  According to the product description "aquaponics is a revolutionary system for growing plants by fertilizing them with the waste water from fish in a sustainable closed system. A combination of aquaculture and hydroponics, aquaponic gardening is an amazingly productive way to grow organic vegetables, greens, herbs, and fruits, while providing the added benefits of fresh fish as a safe, healthy source of protein. On a larger scale, it is a key solution to mitigating food insecurity, climate change, groundwater pollution, and the impacts of overfishing on our oceans."

Last year I wrote a post where I said, "we are at the cusp of a gardening revolution".  One of the subjects of that post was a company called, "Portable Farms" where they make turn-key aquaponic systems. Read why their customers are buying these systems here. Also read what people are doing to make themselves more self-reliant.  It's not traditional stuff we are used to selling, but then as we move into the future traditional stuff just isn't cutting it. So this is one area where the public seems interested, and from what I can see no one in traditional garden centers is addressing. It's a huge opportunity for the locally owned garden center or nursery(LOGON).

Many of my fellow nursery people are struggling to make ends meet. The traditional methods and items they have used or sold in the past are just not bringing in the profits like they use to. Many are going under. What can they do to re-invigorate themselves and their business? We need to sell ideas as well as items. We need to be the resource for the community when it comes to self-reliance. That means being up to date on what's on the customer's mind. Check out the local magazine rack. "Mother Earth News" is now one of the fastest growing magazine in the country.  What do you do when someone comes in and asks about, "deep organic gardening techniques"? Will you have an answer?

17th century coffehouses, portable farms, and your local garden center

We are at the cusp of a gardening revolution. Every where we look new ideas and people are invigorating the field of horticulture. Some feel threatened by the changes, others look forward to the next development. As a nurseryman for over 30 years that I have felt both feelings lately. There is no better time to be in the garden center business than right now, yet that does not mean there are not great challenges to be faced. There will be many more small, medium, and large nurseries that will go out of business. Anytime there is a revolution the world as we know it gets turned upside down. Rather than pine for the old days of the garden center world, better to ride the wave into the future. What does the future hold for us? Ideas that at first seem outlandish, then come to make sense. My last post dealt with window farms. Window farms? How can you have a farm in a window? The idea that it is even a farm is a revolutionary idea. We all have a picture of what a "farm" is, and most of us would not think of a small window garden as a farm. This is one of the big changes we are talking about. It's the change we make in our own minds. A farm is a state of mind. Yes, you can be a farmer and live in the city. How about portable farms?

Check out the website, Portable Farms. They claim, "A Portable Farms& Aquaponics System is a onsite, food-production facility that ensures food security." Key words,"food security". One of the reasons we are seeing a resurgence in home-grown food gardens is concern about how commercial food is being grown and distributed. By growing your own you are in control. Just the idea of "portable farms" is intriguing. The use of hydroponics is growing by leaps and bounds. The necessary changes are coming that will allow us to grow tasty food hydroponically. The taste of commercial grown hydroponic (hot-house) food has been poor, just as commercially grown in soil food is never quite as tasty as home-grown.

Portable Farms makes use of hydroponics and aquaculture. I cannot vouch for the results of this system, yet it seems to me a great idea for producing food using modern technology. Here is a description of the system, and the inventor Colle Davis.  Colle and his wife Phyllis claim, "they enjoyed all the organic table vegetables, berries, tomatoes, and fish they could possibly eat with enough surplus to feed 50 people daily vegetables and one serving of fish per week, per person, for an entire year."

This is only the beginning. As Colle says, "Sometimes, all it takes is one simple idea that leads to other ideas and then on to other answers . . . it is in that collaboration that people will solve the problems of the world". In my last post about window farms the idea of collaboration was key. One person has an idea, its spread through the internet where someone else improves on the idea, and so on. The pace of change is what is so exciting. Ideas that took years to find an audience in the past now just take days, if not hours.

Just as coffee houses in the 17th century became places for discussion and world-changing ideas, the small local garden center should become its 21st century equivalent.  Places for the community to gather and share ideas that will change the world. It's coming sooner than we think.