Country Enterprise - Becoming a specialist grower of flowers and blooms

<P> The public is being artificially educated to demand only a very small range of plants. </P><P>Look at the highly professional displays of flowers and plants for sale in the high street and in markets: the range available is continually decreasing. It is often possible to use this aspect of the market to your advantage. Become established in the area in which you live as a specialist producer. If the public know that you can supply quite beautiful blooms at competitive prices, you will start to build an enterprise. </P><P>People buy flowers for occasions — weddings and funerals — and for regular events. When we produced chrysanthemums regularly, we had a customer on the last week in October every year. It was for a bunch of one dozen of the finest blooms to take to a crematorium. Off they went like clockwork every year to commemorate our customer's mother. When our aged greenhouse gave way under a heavy fall of snow, we gave up as we felt that a new large greenhouse would not justify itself. </P><P>It was hard to tell who felt the most upset that October, us or our customer. We still miss the big blooms and no doubt she would still have been turning up to buy them. That is the kind of trade that is not dependent on impulse-buying and is not adversely affected by highly commercial competition in the high street. </P><P ALIGN=RIGHT> <A HREF=flower3.htm TARGET=mainframe STYLE="text-decoration: none">specialist growers</A></P>