How to Sell Plants and Seedlings (UK): Turning Spare Propagation into Cash

Of all the things a garden can sell, plants have the strangest economics. The raw material is close to free: a packet of tomato seed is 30p or so and holds dozens of plants, a handful of cuttings off a rosemary bush costs nothing, and a clump of hardy geranium lifted and split makes five plants where there was one. Pot those up, grow them on, and by late spring each one is a £2 to £4 sale. Nowhere else in smallholding does such cheap input turn into such a healthy markup. The catch is that the money lives in volume and timing, not in any single pot, and the whole thing is squeezed into a few frantic weeks of spring.

This is a strategy guide to selling spare plants and seedlings well: what is actually worth propagating for sale, where to sell it, how to price and present it, and how much a realistic hobby setup earns. It is general business information, not financial or legal advice. There is a short "keep it legal" box near the end, because the plant health rules genuinely matter here.

What is worth propagating and selling

The winning plant to grow for sale ticks three boxes at once: it is cheap or free to start, it reaches a saleable size quickly, and a gardener will pay a few pounds for it in a pot. Miss any one of those and the maths stops working. A slow, fiddly plant that sells for 50p is not worth your bench space; a fast, free-to-propagate plant that sells for £3 is gold.

The RHS sets out the three routes to nearly-free plants, and they map neatly onto what sells:

• From seed. Cheap, high-volume, and unbeatable for spring veg and bedding. One £2 packet of tomato, courgette, squash, chilli or sweet pea seed gives you a tray of plants that each sell for a pound or two at the peak. This is the backbone of most gate stalls.
• From cuttings. Softwood and hardwood cuttings turn one shrub, herb or houseplant into many for the cost of a bit of compost. Rosemary, thyme, lavender, salvias, penstemons and most houseplants root readily, and each rooted cutting is a saleable pot within a season.
• From division. Lift a mature clump of hardy geranium, sedum, hosta, ornamental grass or day lily, split it, and you have several plants for nothing but an hour's work. Division is the closest thing to free money in the whole trade.

For most gardens, a sensible mix is spring veg and bedding for volume, a rack of herbs (mint, chives, thyme and rosemary all propagate almost embarrassingly easily), and a bench of hardy perennials built up from divisions and cuttings. If you have good light indoors, houseplants are a near-free bolt-on: pilea, spider plants and pothos multiply themselves and, as the houseplant expert Jane Perrone has covered on her On The Ledge podcast, there is a large and active UK market for them online.

What to grow	How you propagate it	Typical sale price (illustrative)	Why it works
Tomato, courgette, chilli, squash plants	Seed, late winter to spring	£1 to £2.50 a pot	Cheap seed, fast, huge spring demand
Herbs (mint, thyme, rosemary, chives)	Cuttings and division	£2 to £4 a pot	Near-free to propagate, always wanted
Hardy perennials (geranium, salvia, sedum, grasses)	Division and cuttings	£3 to £6 a pot	Free from splitting clumps, good value per pot
Sweet peas and cottage bedding	Seed, autumn or spring	£2 to £4 a bundle or pot	Cheap, popular, sells itself in May
Houseplants (pilea, spider plant, pothos)	Offsets and cuttings	£3 to £8 a pot	Free once you have a mother plant, strong online market

The prices above are typical illustrative ranges for well-grown plants sold direct, not a promise; your local market, variety and pot size all move them. The point they make is the one that matters: the sale price is small, but the input cost is smaller still.

Where to sell

The right channel depends on how much you have and how much faff you want. Here is the honest running order, easiest first.

Selling channels, easiest to most involved

1. 1

   The gate stall or honesty table

   Unbeatable in spring. A table outside the house with a price list and an honesty box sells plants to passing gardeners with almost no effort. It costs nothing, needs no pitch fee, and April to June it practically runs itself. Keep it tidy, restock daily, and use a lockable cash box or a note asking for bank transfer.

2. 2

   Local Facebook groups and Marketplace

   One of the strongest channels for spare plants. Local buy-and-sell and gardening groups put you in front of nearby gardeners who can collect, which sidesteps the whole posting question. Photograph plants well, list the variety, and arrange collection or a doorstep pickup.

3. 3

   Plant fairs, village markets and car boots

   A plant fair or a spring village market is where volume happens in a day. Specialist fairs such as the Rare Plant Fair circuit are built around small and home-based nurseries selling exactly this sort of stock, and even a car boot pitch shifts trays of bedding fast. Expect a modest pitch fee, and bring change, bags and clear labels.

4. 4

   Selling online and posting plants

   Reaches the biggest audience and suits houseplants and hardy perennials that travel well, through eBay, Etsy or your own page. It is more work (careful packing, postage costs, and the plant passport rules kick in the moment you post), but it lifts you out of a purely local market.

5. 5

   Selling to a nursery or farm shop

   A trade route that can take volume off your hands, but it is a business-to-business sale: margins are thinner and, crucially, selling to another operator needs plant passports. Worth it only once you are producing consistently and want a wholesale outlet.

Most hobby sellers do best with a combination: a gate stall for steady walk-up sales, local Facebook for the bigger or unusual plants, and a plant fair or two for a burst of volume. Posting and trade sales are the step up, and they come with the paperwork covered below.

Pricing and presentation

Two plants of identical quality, one labelled and staged well and one not, will not sell for the same price. Presentation is most of the job.

• Price a little under the garden centre. Gardeners know roughly what a 9cm perennial or a tomato plant costs in a retail centre. Sit just below that and you look like good value while still making almost pure margin, because your input cost was pennies. Do not race to the bottom: a stall of 50p plants signals jumble, not quality.
• Label every single variety. A plant with a clear name, and a line on height, colour or "good for pollinators", sells for more and sells faster than a mystery green pot. Waterproof labels or a laminated card by each tray do the work of a salesperson.
• Only ever sell strong, healthy plants. One customer who buys a sickly plant does not come back, and word gets round a village fast. Sell plants that are well-rooted, clean of pests, and the right size for the season. Pot the rest on and sell them later, or keep them.
• Time it to the season. Have veg and bedding ready as sowing fever hits in April and May, perennials looking full and just coming into growth, and do not put frost-tender plants out too early. A plant that peaks in appearance the week the buyers are looking is worth double one that peaked a month before.

The realistic money

It is worth being straight about the ceiling, because plant selling is easy to romanticise. At the gate-stall end, this is pocket money: it comfortably covers your seed, compost, pots and labels and leaves a bit over, which for many gardeners is the whole point, as it turns a hobby that used to cost money into one that pays for itself. Put in a real spring effort, a few hundred well-grown pots across several lines, a couple of plant fairs, and steady local Facebook sales, and it becomes a genuine seasonal side income for the March-to-June window, on the order of a few hundred pounds in a strong year.

The step beyond that, a year-round living from plants, is a different animal. That is a micro-nursery: polytunnels, hundreds of lines, propagation at scale, APHA registration and passporting, pitch fees at fairs most weekends, and the labour to match. The specialist growers on circuits like the Rare Plant Fair are running exactly that kind of operation, and they earn accordingly, but nobody should assume a gate stall scales into it without a large jump in graft and setup. Match your ambition to the effort you actually want to put in, and a spring plant sideline is one of the most satisfying small earners a garden offers.

Where to go next

Selling plants sits inside the wider job of getting a garden to pay. To price so stock moves through the short spring window rather than sitting unsold, see pricing for profit. To reach beyond your postcode by posting living plants, read selling online and get the plant passport rules straight first. And if propagation is new, the RHS guides to seed sowing, cuttings and division build the skill that makes all of this nearly free.