Cash from Kangaroo Paws: how to make your garden lucrative (2024)

I was broke, living in what was still basically a shed in the bush, when I learnt I could make money from my garden. Jean Hobbins who lived down the road had been supplying a couple of local restaurants with bunches of flowers for their tables - not big decorative florist type bouquets, but posies of sweet peas, a few ferns, some thryptomene or kangaroo paws. As this happened more than four decades ago - and Jean and the restaurants are gone from this world, though not our memories - I can admit she also illegally supplied the restaurants with rich cream from Jackie the cow (I think it's a compliment to have a cow named for you), eggs from her chooks, and the carcasses of young roosters that made the most wonderful coq au vin.

But Jean was moving into a retirement village. I didn't have a cow, nor an enormous chook run, but I did have all the kinds of flowers Jean had been selling, because she'd given me seeds or cuttings of them. She suggested I take over the flower supply.

So I did. I also planted annuals specifically to sell: sweet peas (which the wallabies ate), deliciously clove scented dianthus, shaggy mini sunflowers, Iceland poppies for winter. One week I included bay leaves in the posies, and found out there was a market for herbs, like thyme, savoury, rosemary, and tarragon. I planted a heck of a lot of parsley and sold that, too, as well as water cress and other veg, like the round zucchini and purple carrots that that weren't available commercially back then.

The money from those buckets of flowers and boxes of veg was enough, in fact, to keep the wolf from the door till that never forgotten week when I sold my first article to The Canberra Times and banked the advance for my first book. If I hadn't moved to writing more books and more articles, by now I would probably have every available acre in flowers, herbs, fruits and gourmet veg .

I suspect restaurants are just as eager these days for really fresh gourmet vegetables, and possibly posies of flowers. Even a small garden has enough room for a couple of dozen posies a week, every week of the year, as long as you plan well. Looking out the window now I can see ginger lilies, the big white blooms of magnolia grandiflora late variety of agapanthus, hydrangeas in various shades of pink and white, blue sage and purple sage and a heck of a lot of dahlias, as well as various types of ferns.

The dahlias, in fact, might be even better money spinners than fresh flowers, fruit and veg, as they can be sold online. One dahlia tuber can turn into six dahlia tubers in a year, or even 1000 dahlia plants in two years if you collect the seeds once the flowers have died back and a nicely dried. Dahlias grow ridiculously fast from seed. You'll get blooms the first year, and enough tubers to divide and sell in about three years, though if you have several varieties of dahlia you'll find they're a bit promiscuous in the pollination department, and the big dinner plate yellow dahlia has been pollinated by the a mini red dahlia. Most of your seedlings won't come true to type, but this is a good thing, as you can sell dahlia varieties that no on else can offer through the various online sites where one can buy or sell anything from a felted chicken shaped tea cosy to hand made and quite unique garden gnomes. Dahlia tubers can be posted, just like saffron bulbs -but sell the saffron stigmas, too,' either fresh or dried and posted.

There are so many other ways to sell your gardens produce, from offering weekly boxed of assorted fruit, flowers and veg to sharing the costs of a stall at a market with other growers to an honesty box by the front gate. You can even sell bags of 'home grown' compost, bottles of worm 'juice' from your worm farm, or packets of 'local' seeds. Use your garden as raw material for dried flowers and leaves to decorate candles or turn into greeting cards, or baskets made from pliable prunings of grape bushes, wisteria, kiwi fruit - one determined kiwi vine could supply enough stems for at least 50 baskets a year. Turn your garage into a mushroom farm, or pot up cuttings or seedlings of your more unusual plants to sell to garden centres...the big jump is learning to look at your garden as a small farm, instead of just exterior decoration.

These days I give away flowers and fruit, or swap them for other's produce, because we still have commercial size crops of many fruits. But if I could have twinned myself all those years ago, one of me would be writing and the other still selling fruit, veg and flowers, seeing the joy on people's faces as they smelled the scented roses you can't buy in a florist shop or their delight as they found out what a sun ripened apricot can taste like . Now that Araluen has begun its own markets you may yet find me sitting behind a table selling ornamental citrons, buckets of jonquils and deep purple sage, as well as finger limes, Tahitian limes, and half a dozen varieties of avocado, creamer than any in the supermarket, once again making money from my garden.

This week I am:

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