WHOLESALE NURSERY MANAGEMENT BHT212

  • Start your own production nursery!
  • Start small, grow in your own good time
  • Buy an established nursery for a quick start

Whatever way you enter the Production Nursery Industry, it's important to do it with an understanding and awareness of how to succeed. Managing a production nursery involves more than just propagating and potting up plants. Even the small nursery must be able to not only producer plants, but do it at a pre determined cost, then sustain those plants before and during marketing.. The nursery industry currently has a real need for people with skills and knowledge in managing production plant nurseries! This course provides a solid grounding for developing those skills.

Start up, Buy, or Get a Job Managing a Production Nursery

Whatever way you enter the Production Nursery Industry, it's important to do it with an understanding and awareness of how to succeed. Managing a production nursery involves more than just propagating and potting up plants. Even the small nursery must be able to not only producer plants, but do it at a pre determined cost, then sustain those plants before and during marketing.. The nursery industry currently has a real need for people with skills and knowledge in managing production plant nurseries! This course provides a solid grounding for developing those skills.

COURSE STRUCTURE

This subject involves eight lessons as follows:

  1. Nursery Site Organisation: Buying an established nursery or establishing a new site, site planning, estimating space requirements.
  2.  Management: Government and commercial nurseries, partnerships, companies, sole proprietorships, developing a management structure, labour relations and seasonal staff, work programs and production timing.
  3. Nutrition and Pest Management: Field crops, container plants, principles of fertiliser use and plant nutrition.
  4. Growing Media: Soils and soil-free mixes, rockwool, sterilisation, techniques.
  5. Irrigation: Methods and equipment, estimation of water requirements and use of liquid fertilisers through irrigation.
  6. Modifying Plant Growth: Modification techniques, flower forcing and quality control.
  7. Marketing Strategies: Exploiting existing markets, developing new markets, advertising, product presentation, pricing, plant recycling.
  8. Selection of Nursery Crops: Developing a stock list, operational flow charts, market surveys.

Wholesale Nurseries

Wholesale nurseries, and sometimes retail nurseries, often specialise in a particular group of plants. The following are common types of specialisations:

  • Trees
  • Shrubs and ground covers
  • Flower and vegetable seedlings
  • Natives
  • Ferns
  • Conifers
  • Herbs
  • Indoor plants
  • Fruit trees
  • Natives
  • Orchids
  • Water plants
  • Perennials and rock plants
  • Palms
  • Rainforest plants
  • Budded and grafted plants

Specialist Nurseries

Most regions or countries have small numbers of more highly specialised nurseries. These nurseries often service a whole country, or even an international market. The market is rarely big enough even in a large city to sustain this type of specialist nursery without marketing its plants more widely. This type of nursery often sells plants both retail and wholesale, or wholesale only. They might deal with only one particular genus or focus mainly on one genus. Typical nurseries of this type might specialise in one of the following plant groups:

  • Roses
  • Bonsai
  • Fuchsias
  • Proteas
  • Azaleas and rhododendrons
  • Chrysanthemums
  • Daisies
  • Liliums
  • Iris
  • Cacti
  • Pelargoniums
  • Impatiens
  • African violets
  • Camellias

Some nurseries combine a number of different but compatible specialist types of plants. In this way they can buffer against any unforeseen drop in demand for one of the types they grow.

This course is relevant to any of these situations.