By Sandie Shores

Selling potted herbs at a busy farmers’ market can be very profitable, not only during the spring but also throughout the season. Spring, of course, is the time when your customers want small herb transplants for their gardens. These early season sales will most likely bring you the largest volume of sales. However, potted herb sales can be quite profitable until the end of market season with a little insight into the customers’ lifestyle and desires.

The herbs to grow
For the most part our customers are looking for herbs to plant in their gardens that they can harvest for culinary purposes. Those should be the ones that you should grow in volume. There may be some call for a few medicinal herbs such as Echinacea or St. John’s wort and specimen plants such as angelica. If you have the space and time it would be to your advantage to have a few pots of these herbs available.
The most popular herbs are the same ones that are most favored for cooking and this can vary somewhat by region and the ethnic groups in your area. Basil is by far the most popular along with some of the basil varieties – lemon, purple, Thai – so be sure to plant as much of this as your space allows. Chives, garlic chives, Greek oregano, lavender (some varieties) parsley, rosemary, sage, sweet marjoram, sorrel, summer and winter savory, and thyme are all easy to start from seed and sell well in my area. Herbs such as epazote, fennel, lemon balm, burnet and lemongrass sell in limited quantities.
Bay (Laurus nobilis), some rosemary and lavender varieties, mint (spearmint) and French tarragon should be started from cuttings or division because they either do not produce viable seed or do not come true to seed. Liners (small rooted plants) can be purchased wholesale from various commercial nurseries.
Order liners early in the winter for shipment in late winter or early spring. If you wait too long the best varieties may be sold out. These should be potted into 4-inch or larger pots and allowed to grow on. Be sure to schedule your liner delivery early if your market has a rule, as ours does, that vendors must grow a plant for a certain number of days before being offered for sale. This voice of experience tells you that shipping delays do happen and you can lose sales by not receiving your liners on time!
I do not recommend selling arugula, cilantro or dill as potted plants. These simply do not transplant well. Although we, as commercial growers, may do so if they are transplanted when the seedlings are very small, we cannot expect our home gardener customers to be skilled in this procedure. Cilantro, for instance, if it were to survive transplanting will bolt almost immediately. It is such a short-lived annual that it is worthless to sell it potted.
These herbs are popular and you will get many requests for these as potted plants. If you take the time to explain why you will not sell these as potted plants for transplanting you will gain the respect of the customer – something you may lose if you sell them something that will be a loss to them.
Herb transplants should be young for optimum growth after transplanting. Herbs that are root bound or too large for their pots will have difficulty recovering from the transplant process. Take care to not over-fertilize the potted herbs. Those with soft, lanky growth will have problems acclimating to the soil conditions in their new homes.
The season for selling garden transplants can be as long as two or three months depending upon your location. It is wise to do succession plantings of the annual herbs every two or three weeks so that you can offer young transplants right into mid-summer. Older perennial herbs should be up potted as they outgrow the small pots.
The plants that are offered for sale should be roughly all the same size, especially if you are bringing a whole flat of one herb. They should be young, just 3 or 4 inches tall and basil should have only 3 or 4 sets of leaves.
Counsel your customers to have patience and delay transplanting the herbs until the weather conditions are right. Most of them will be eager to get their herb gardens planted but if done too early they may be lost due to late frost or heavy spring rains.

Containers
There are several schools of thought regarding pot sizes. For early transplant sales I recommend small sized pots for annuals and perennials started from seed. We use 2.5 or 3-inch pots (3.5 inches deep), which fit into press fit trays, 32 to a tray. These trays keep the pots upright for ease of transport and also are excellent for merchandising, as the pots don’t fall over when some are removed from the tray. We charge $1.00 for annuals and $1.50 for perennials in these size pots. This pricing is very attractive to the customer and there were many spring market days when we sold close to 1,000 of these pots in just four and one half hours!
Some growers plant all the herbs, even those started from seed, in 4-inch square pots and charge more for them. Often they will crowd several seedlings into a 4-inch pot with the idea that a full pot will be attractive to the customer. While they may look appealing for a short time crowded this way it will only be a week or two before they begin to stretch, become lanky and lose condition. Many times they will not survive the separation process. If the gardener transplants the herbs as they grew in the pot -crowded – the results will be less than desirable. This can make for a very unhappy customer and is a good way to lose her business for good.
It is best to plant a single herb in each pot. This way they can grow to their fullest potential, will transplant well without the need for separation and probable root damage. After transplanting, it will grow full, provide good yields and make your customer happy.
Plastic pots are convenient but also wasteful. They can be reused if washed and soaked in a 10% bleach solution for 20 minutes and then rinsed well. Many of our customers return the pots to us for recycling. Yours will too if you let them know that you would be happy to take back the empty pots.
An alternative to using plastic pots would be to grow and sell the individual seedlings in soil blocks or peat pots. These work well for young plants but as the plants grow the roots will grow through the soil or peat and this can have a stunting effect on the plants. These types of containers also dry out quicker and require constant monitoring.
Offering herbs in 4 and 6 packs is a way to increase your sales. Give the customer some choices; you could plant these with all one herb such as basil or a variety of herbs per pack. We offer basil samplers that contain 6 different types of basil and sell them all every week. We charged $3 per 4 pack of annuals and $5 per 6 pack of annuals. Our customers always feel they are getting a bargain!

Marketing and display
Marketing and displaying your herbs is just as important as the plants themselves. If your customers can’t see them or have to dig through an unorganized mess you will lose sales. Take a hint from the supermarkets. Put the items you most want to sell at the customer’s eye level. This isn’t always possible for us who sell at farmers’ market since most everyone brings folding tables that are meant for dining on and not display. Some vendors put the plants and flats on the ground. The customer then has to look down on the plants and bend over to pick them up or smell them. While it is true that the customer will see the nice new growth at the top of the plant it is not conducive to selling herbs. We also should consider those customers that have trouble bending and lifting.
We have folding racks specially made for us. These are ladder type racks with regular ladder spreaders (the metal locking device that holds the ladder open) holding them open. We use vinyl coated white metal racks suspended between the “ladder” rungs on two levels-one just above eye level and one just below. These metal racks are the type used in closets and can be purchased at any hardware store. They are wide enough to hold a flat and we are able to display 20 flats with room for some individual pots as well. It takes about two minutes to set up the ladders and racks and they fold flat for easy transport.
We also use six folding tables, all covered with the same solid color vinyl tablecloths. The many varieties of lavender and rosemary, all in 4-inch pots, are on two of these tables at a right angle to the line of wooden ladder racks.
Flowery or busy print table covers may be eye catching but these confuse the brain. It will take a second for the consumer to actually see what you are offering for sale against a busy backdrop. Solid colors show your product, not a tablecloth!
Be sure that each individual herb has a plant tag. If you don’t want to buy preprinted “stick” tags you can make these yourself using wooden stakes or purchased blank plastic tags and write the information needed. It is quite frustrating for a customer to get home and not remember what herb they bought. I’ve even had customers bring unmarked herbs, purchased from another vendor, to me for identification because they had forgotten what the vendor said they were!
One of the most frustrating things for me is to go into a store to buy an item and not be able to find a price for it. It is the same way for our customers. If they have to search, or ask, for the price they very well may decide to buy elsewhere where it is easier to make their buying decision. Make sure that your prices are right there where the herbs are so they don’t have to look all over to find them. (This holds true with all the items you sell.) All of our herbs in the 2.5-inch pots are on the display racks. Computer printed signs on yellow paper are placed in clear sheet protectors and clipped to the racks every few feet. It is impossible for the customer to miss the pricing!
All the plants in 4-inch and larger pot sizes are priced with individual tags. I made price tags from old vinyl blinds cut to the appropriate sizes. These are pulled out at the time of the sale and reused. Removing the price tags also makes it easier to tally up the total sale, especially when we have helpers.

Sharing information
Many customers have an interest in growing herbs but don’t know where to start. You, as the herb expert, may find yourself spending much time teaching – not only about growing and using herbs, but also about the varieties and caring for them. I’ve found myself teaching mini-classes each Saturday morning!
One way to help ease this situation is to make up information sheets for some of the more unusual herbs. These can be done on your computer using a program that will make postcard sizes so you can get four to a sheet of paper. A good, but inexpensive, paper cutter will be an indispensable aid. The sheets should contain information about the culture and care of the herb. We clip one sheet on the flat of the herb (housed in plastic for reuse each week) and then place the rest loose in a sandwich bag and hang it by the herb for the customer to take home. Sometimes I will also put a recipe for using that particular herb right there for the customer to have.
We also have large printed information sheets describing the characteristics of the varieties of rosemary, lavender and vegetables we sell. This, again, helps the customer to make buying decision without having to read the tiny print on the stick tags.
Place the herb plants in the same location in your display from week to week. This gives the returning customer some continuity and they won’t have to search your entire setup to find what they are looking for. Don’t you find it frustrating when you go to your usual grocery store and find they have moved everything?
Those of us who sell lots of plants should accommodate the customer with their shopping needs. Have places for them to set the plants, or their other purchases. We always have a card table in the middle of our display area. It has a calculator, a note pad, some business cards and plenty of boxes and bags stashed underneath. It is also a good spot to display a special plant or two that we wish to highlight. On our front line of tables we place a bright orange piece of plastic marked “plants here”. This helps to keep our tablecloths clean and soil away from other items we sell.
Place stacks of cardboard flats in several places around your stall for your customers convenience-don’t make them ask if they can buy more than one or two plants!
Bring all the herbs plants you can – you can’t sell them if you don’t have them with you! We all know how much work it is selling plants at the market but if you have fun and love what you are doing it will show in your work, your plants and your attitude. Your customers will love you for it!

Next month, Sandie will discuss growing and selling container grown herbs and vegetables throughout the entire market season.

Sandie Shores and her partner in Herb’s Herbs sell chemical-free herbs, plants and vegetables at the Rochester, Minnesota, Downtown Farmers’ Market. Visit Sandie’s web site at www.freshcutherbs.com.
Sandie Shores is the author of Growing and Selling Fresh-Cut Herbs and Cooking with The Herb Ladies!”. The revised edition of Growing and Selling Fresh-Cut Herbs was just published by Ball Publishing and is available for $34.95 plus $4 shipping from GFM Books, PO Box 3747, Lawrence, KS 66046; 800-307-8949. Or order at the online store at www.growingformarket.com