Peonies (flowers, iris, Hydrangea, trees)

[oregonwoodsmoke]

I just bought two five gallon peonies, very healthy looking, from a nice little old lady that grows them in her backyard.


There were about a dozen to choose from and she sells them for $10 each, which is a very good price for a healthy fancy peony, so I was delighted to get them.


She told me she started with 150 of them. Put the ad up the day before and only a dozen were left. She does the divisions herself, and I was thinking: that's a nice little supplemental income for a nice elderly lady who is maybe living on her social security check,


She also sells hostas and iris and hydrangeas. Not enough to be a full time nursery, but perhaps a hundred plants or so to add a bit to her income without being too much of a burden on labor. She raises popular plants that are easy and cheap to propagate and sells them cheaply enough that she can move them all in just a day or two, so she isn't tied down.


Perhaps a good idea for those of you who would like a couple of extra dollars and enjoy gardening.

[LoriNJ]

I keep telling my husband to sell some of his potted fig trees! He takes cuttings of the mother tree (in the ground) and nurtures them over the winter. Then they go outside in the summer and get BIG, even in pots (which are also big). They sure do require a lot of watering, which somehow became my responsibility because I water the other containers in my garden. He won't sell them, though. Something about his heritage and his father always having fig trees and he wants to have extras in case all the others die... What can I say.


I may have to sell or give away some of my daylilies the next time I divide them. I've run out of raised beds. Well, there are always pots. LOL

[oregonwoodsmoke]

Day lilies sell well as long as they aren't ditch lilies.



I've started a lot of fig trees and I found them to be excellent for barter. I'd trade them for other plants that I wanted.


The same for grapes. Grapes are the easiest plants to start from cuttings and they have huge barter value.

[NYC refugee]

Keep talking. I have peonies and figs and grapes.



Lori - How large of a pot do the figs need? I have a branch from a defunct fig tree but I'm not sure the pot is large enough and it's already three and should fruit, but not yet. The other fig tree I plan to prune this winter.



Does your hubs use a sealer when he prunes?

[ersatz]

Originally Posted by oregonwoodsmoke

Day lilies sell well as long as they aren't ditch lilies.

I've started a lot of fig trees and I found them to be excellent for barter. I'd trade them for other plants that I wanted.

I have a lot of "ditch lilies" (Hemerocallis fulva) that eventually took over about a quarter of my backyard. They choked out all the edibles and herbs I planted there. I periodically dug the lilies up and threw them out but it seemed like a never-ending (and losing) battle, until I discovered that daylilies are a highly nutritious edible themselves. Now I use them in all kinds of recipes and my daylily population is rapidly dwindling. They may look like a plague until they look like Volunteer Free Groceries!

https://cookforgood.com/how-to-eat-daylilies/

I have beaucoup fig trees that bear prolifically but I almost never harvest a fig. Hordes of squirrels invade my yard and carry all of my figs (ripe or unripe) away, even though I spent hundreds of dollars protecting my bushes. I tried insect netting, animal/bird netting, even wire mesh. They tear through all of that within a couple hours after I install it. I was appalled that they even rapidly chewed through wire mesh to get to the figs.

I also enjoyed my lovely peony flowers for the past four years but this year all but one clump died off. That one clump that survived stayed about 1/4 as large as normal and never bore flowers this year. I wondered if peonies have a short lifespan, but what I read online says that they can last up to 50 years.