by Sharon Meyer

It is often said that if a person truly wants to start a home business that will be successful then they should find something they are passionate about and build their business in that area.

For many years my passion in life has been gardening but, outside of raising vegetables to sell at a farmers market how could I possibly turn gardening into a profitable business?

I learned quite by accident that what I hadn't given much thought to was niche marketing within the gardening scene. I never realized the profit was in my passion of growing rare and exotic plants from seed. To me it was just cheaper to fund my enthusiasm for rare and exotic plants by growing what I wanted from seed. The profit part came about out of necessity. Fall and Winter were quickly approaching and I had outgrown my hobby greenhouse. Not wanting to lose any of my precious tropical plants to winter I decided to auction them on Ebay.

Amazingly, my extra plants were selling for anywhere from $50.00 to $100.00 a plant ! This piqued my curiosity as I wasn't looking to start a home business but, if this was the kind of money I could make selling rare or exotic plants that I had grown from seed then I wanted a piece of the pie.

I began studying other on line plant auctions at Ebay and I quickly learned that there was a nice little niche market for rare and exotic plants. This reminded me of a story with a parable I had heard of long ago about a man who had sold everything he owned including his home and property to go out and search for gold. He soon learns about a great discovery of gold had been found in his home town so, he heads home only to find that the gold discovered had been found on the very same property he had just sold. Just like this man I had been sitting on my own gold mine of a business and never knew it.

These days, instead of purchasing a small amount of seed for my own use I will instead purchase a larger quantity. Seeds are quite inexpensive to buy when compared to the sale of the actual seedling or full grown plant. I can set my own "Buy It Now" price or if the plant is extremely hard to come by then I set a minimum opening bid and leave the rest to the plant enthusiasts to determine just how bad they want that plant and at what price.
My biggest expense to date has been the neccesity of having to build a much larger greenhouse to grow plants in. Considering I am living in the sub tropical state of Florida and can pretty much grow year round, I quickly recouped the layout costs.

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