Quality Ornamental / Food Crops

[reed]

I would like to try to make a little money on my gardening but I already tried the farm market route and it doesn't work well for me at least for produce. My garden is to small to produce a lot of any one thing and my stuff isn't uniform enough, the distance to our markets is too far, there is too much competition with people who buy at the Amish auction and pretend to be farmers. It's a lot of trouble for example to grow a tomato or a watermelon haul it somewhere and try to sell it in the two or three day window before it goes bad so I gave it up in favor of selling things like bedding plants, trees I start from seed or grape and berry plants.

I have always been interested in the fall ornamental market, around here that is by far the most profitable. People will pay much higher dollar for decorations than food but I didn't want to grow just decorations. Now I realize it is easy enough to have the best of both the food and decoration worlds.

I'm developing two or maybe three varieties of corn that I intend to be prime quality for food and highly decorative at the same time and unlike sweet corn they don't have to be sold in a short time window and should sell for a dollar an ear instead of three dollars a dozen. I'v recently became aware that  ornamental squash can also be high quality food where I used to think ornamental squash wasn't eatable, most probably isn't but mine will be. People won't have to know unless they ask that  their expensive decorations can also be delicious for supper, a real case of what they don't know won't hurt em. So, I'm starting or rather scaling up two squash projects.

Then I can add some things to my spring plants. Runner beans come to mind. Since I discovered they transplant pretty easy I think can start and sell plants. And dahlias, Lots of people love dahlias and I was shocked at how well those I got from Joseph a couple years ago did. Super easy to sprout and transplant, they grew into big plants that bloomed all season long. They also made lots big tubers the size of baking potatoes, I only sampled some raw, kinda like a peppery water chestnut. I left them in the ground to test for hardiness and they didn't make it but I got lots of seeds. I didn't grow them last year but they are another easy to grow and probably easy to sell as bedding plants crop so I'm adding them to my list.

Last but not least is my sweet potatoes. I have some previously unmentioned super blooming varieties (not currently for sale or trade) that I think might do well on the ornamental market. This project is farther from market than the other projects cause of the need to be able to do mass cloning in a green house, which I don't have.

So there is corn, squash, runner beans, dahlias, and sweet potatoes, good food that can be sold for pricey decorations.  I bet there are others that I'm not thinking of yet, any suggestions?

[Doro]

Dried poppy seed heads are very popular here.
Also rye seed heads with some centimetres of straw on them. Not entirely sure what people do with them though, for Christmas crafts I guess.

[reed]

AH! I forgot about poppies, they sell out in a heart beat at the flea market, also from Joseph's seeds.

[Carol Deppe]

Some amaranths make dramatic fall flowers.

Selling one or a few wholesale seed crops to retail seed companies on contract is more lucrative and easier for most than selling plants or produce in farmers market.

OSSI Pledges new ornamental varieties and breeding material as well as edibles. :-)

[Joseph Lofthouse]

One of the side-projects that I expect to emerge from the Beautifully Promiscuous and Fruity Tomato project is tomatoes with huge decorative flowers and unusual foliage. If that happens it will be both edible and decorative.

I get a lot of comments from people that they are keeping my dried beans (sold in glass jars) as decorations in their kitchens rather than eating them. Mixes of species work very well for decorative purposes. That seems like too much labor to grow compared to corn or poppy seed heads. Ha! I bet that I could sell corn seed in jars, as a decoration, rather than as food, and get much higher prices.

Aloe vera, and cactus can grow for years in the same pot.

[triffid]

Nigella species make wonderfully decorative flowers, seed heads and foliage. Their seeds are edible and a trendy health-food.

Branches of rosehips, sea-buckthorn, and Sorbus berries go for an awful lot of money around autumn and Christmastime over here. And so do the syrups & jelly made from them.

[reed]

Selling one or a few wholesale seed crops to retail seed companies on contract is more lucrative and easier for most than selling plants or produce in farmers market.

I like that idea a lot, I just need to scale up my production but I'v been thinking on it. Might be that I need to specialize in just a few particular things, kinda already moving that way already. I don't want to grow just those few things but all the rest would just be for our own use. It's fun visiting the local biannual plant and animal swaps and flea markets where I sell my plants and I about always sell out but live plants has some of the same drawbacks for me as fresh produce. Seeds on the other hand eliminate all of that.

OSSI Pledges new ornamental varieties and breeding material as well as edibles. :-)

I like that idea a lot too! Especially the breeding material part, I'v got some ideas about that.

[Diane Whitehead]

You might not even have to grow anything.

I saw branches covered with lichen being sold for hefty prices.  I don't know how many sold.

[reed]

We have sold all kinds of dried things at the flea market and swap meets. Thistle heads, goldenrod, various wild grass seed head. I'v sold a good amount of black locust tree bark on Ebay for orchid mounts, I just pull it off my firewood and boil it in a big kettle to make sure I don't send them any critters, or at least not live ones. Ohio river drift wood sells pretty good too.

Selling stuff you can just find for free and sell is pretty fun and I'll keep doing that too but my main interest is in growing. I'm actually also getting a little tired of the live spring plants for reasons mentioned earlier.

As far as selling either a finished product or seeds, I would like eventually to do both. It is definitely time though to narrow down to a core set of crops to specialize in.  Since corn and squash are the main fall ornamentals around here and especially for corn one of my most favored things to grow those two are where I'll start.  My primary focus on breeding my new varieties will be for food quality but with these two crops the much more profitable ornamental nature just comes along for free.

[gmuller]

Reed,
how about storage tomatoes? Tied up trusses of Piennolo del Vesuvio sell for a huge premium around Naples. Last for months. There are quite a few varieties that are used this way in Italy - have a search for pomodorino inverno (inverno = winter)
https://www.turismo.it/gusto/articolo/art/quei-pomodorini-rosso-vesuvio-id-6960/
http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/03/87/c2/4b/masseria-brigantino.jpg
https://www.salentokm0.com/it/antiche-varieta/pomodoro-dinverno

I've attached a pic of a photo i took in an upmarket foodie supermarket in Naples a couple of years ago  - 15 euros for 1.5 kg - much cheaper in the street market tho, where they also come in yellow.

Hanging plaits of garlic or onions or shallots? Lavender bunches? Branches of dried bay leaves?
GM

[orflo]

Tetragonolobus purpureus
Camassia spp
Calochortus spp
Lilium spp
Tigridia pavonia
The rainbow chard mixture, although not for flowers
Lathyrus tuberosus
and other lathyrus spp
Walking stick cabbage (again, not for flowers)
Bloody sorrel (leaves!)
Crambe maritima ( especially the lily white)
Hesperis matronalis (sometimes, pink, mostly white flowers)
Phlomis tuberosa has nice decorative leaves
Hosta spp
Aralia cordata as a big eye-catcher
Codonopsis spp
Some allium spp are very decorative (allium obliquum, schubertii, cernuum are just a few)
Cornus is a nice one when it's flowering, and for the autumn foliage, but of course it's a shrub/tree
Centranthus ruber
Basella rubra (stem and foliage, not the flowers)
Dioscorea batatas  again foliage and autumn colors
and many more that I don't think about right now

[reed]

Thanks, that walking stick cabbage sounds interesting. Hosta volunteers from seed in our yard and we have potted up and sold the babies. I got a lot more interested in Hosta when I found out it is eatable but haven't explored it a lot yet. 

[Olaf Nurlif]

Maybe you could sell brooms made from Sorghum.
I bet you could even breed a (free threshing?) "grain-broomcorn".
Well, maybe they exist. The few broom-sorghums I saw all had small kernels that were totally enclosed in the hull (glumes?).

I love Sorghum.

[Carol Deppe]

Reed, getting back to edible ornamentals--

What about breeding some sweet potatoes selected for both beauty and flavor of foliage? Maybe it would be happy houseplants in winter that you could snack upon. Then it gets used to make starts that are set out in spring and grown for greens.

In tropical areas sweet potatoes are a favorite crop to interplant with corn. I suspect they wouldnt get enough sun interplanted with corn in temperate areas. But maybe they would. or maybe they would if they were mostly producing leaves rather than roots. Might be worthwhile deliberately selecting under shady conditions. Lots of urbanites have gardens than are mostly shaded because of other houses and trees.

[reed]

see: http://opensourceplantbreeding.org/forum/index.php?topic=116.0