[binabik]

I know most people in this forum seem to garden because they want to and i do want to don't get me wrong but i have a question

First off i eventually want to take some classes pertaining to herbalism and i have head of herbalists who go out and collect the herbs from the wild in order to sell them to bigger companies and can make a living off of this.

my question is if i were to make a herb garden would i be able to make a living off of selling the herbs and how would i go about doing this. also any information on selling herbs would be good

oh and the herbs i am thinking of are non illegal and more for medicinal purposes. If i was going to grow them myself they would be the rarer ones that either you can't take from nature or aren't found in nature very often or maybe even ones that aren't grown in the area you live in, for instance say something is grown in austrailia i would have an indoor or outdoor green house in order to grow it in my local enviornment

thanks in advance

[binabik]

Oh and it would be really cool to do a small home grown tea though i don't know what htis entails, in fact i haven't done any gardening, just interested in it and want to do it.

[Cyrano]

Bottom line on selling herbs for a living: even if you can certify your herbs as 100% organic, a rating that takes a minimum of 3 years to attain, probably not. You would have to sell an immense amount of them just to break even, even though many good herbs are perennials and will self-seed. You also have to be careful what you plant in proximity to what, a lesson I learned the hard way. Some herbs will cross-pollinate, but the results are unfortunate; thanks to planting basil next to spearmint, I have the skunkiest-tasting spearmint in the world, completely useless in cooking. (I keep them around, though, because the bees like them, the flowers look exotic and they make good perches for the dragonflies.)

Most people who cultivate herbs grow only enough for their own needs. There's a reason for that.

[binabik]

well i used to think the only way to make money off the herbs would be to sell it to medicine companies, like a contracter but after looking at the internet (i did that after posting this) it seem like there is a possibility to sell even normal herbs. Basil sells alot. One thing they all seem to agree on is that it takes a whole lot of time and it would be more than 40 hours of work a week. Also someone said that when they were selling thiers at farmers markets and flea markets they would have 50-80 different types of herbs availaible, They mentioned this was on the low end of the successful ones and some of the successful ones had 300+different herbs to choose from. I think it would be ausome to have 300 herbs to choose from for people to buy and i do understand how labor intensive it would be. Some places say start small, know what you are doing and you can at least make a little bit, this one guy i read about was making about a dollar an ounce for the common herbs he was selling and he was selling about 3 pounds of it about 3 times a week, this is about 144 bucks a week and he wasn't spending very much time on it and he wanted to grow them anyway.

also i read this thing about how resturants sometimes buy bulk common herbs in order to offer fresh herbs but you should make a deal before you go and start growing.

i am mainly interested in information pertaining to contracting your services for herbs from a big company like a medicine company. They gotta have someone making enough herbs for all the vitamins and minerals that are out there and i believe this is one way to do it, plus some are rare and they need as much as they can get

[binabik]

oh and i feel i should mention that i plan on taking some herbalism classes if i can ever find any, none in my college right now



this webpage promotes selling it and i like thier last thing about knowing where to sell

http://www.disabled-world.com/artman...ng-herbs.shtml

talking about word of mouth, naturopaths, flea markets, and that it doesn't take too much money to start into it


this next one looks good, i especially like the part about who will buy herbs, what i am probably thinking is the wholesale distributers but for medicinal type herbs, not cooking ones

http://www.freshcutherbs.com/faq.htm


this next one talks about some of the money figures involved and what are top sellers

http://www.herbsandnaturalremedies.com/top-sellers.htm