These past few months have been up and down. But I've slowly moved forward day by day.
In the last month I have gone from 2 species to 13 solidly established and multiplying. I have 2 others that are fighting to hang in while I clean them up (Iguazu 2009, and Elatine hydropiper). I've also killed 3x Cryptocoryne x timahensis... So that's not so great. But the fact that the rest of my plants are doing so well makes up for it.
I'm going to be moving my lab in the spring into my mother's old commercial bakery that she retired from and closed. It has far more space that I need, a 50 amp breaker vs the 15 amp breaker I'm working off of right now. And it makes room for the nursery (assuming we're still living here in October when the baby is due). Very exciting to be looking forward to not only winter being over, but moving into a drastically more appropriate work space. I'll be able to set up my barnstead still to make water (grade 2 water distillation, that automatically runs and fills the ~20 gallon glass carboy... So no more hooking my little RO system up to the kitchen sink to make 2.5 gallons at a time). I'll have the electric to run both my 14qt pressure cookers at once to make 7 liters of media at a time. I'll be able to have room to set up a full rack for each species, rather than one shelf for each, which will allow me to maintain not only more of my large multiplication containers but also produce far more sale size cups to support wholesale operations.
That is the direction I decided to go with this all. I don't have the time, experience, or desire to develop ads, place ads, drive sales, maintain a website + online store, do customer service, handle people who want refunds because they ordered something and then were gone for the weekend it arrived and it baked/froze on their porch and they want their money back. No... I don't ever want to go back to customer service. I'll keep the stuff up on ebag and Amazon for now. But my plan is to focus on wholesale operations. Find a few (my goal for 2019 is 4 or 5) customers buying a decent quantity of plants from me each month. Websites, brick and mortar stores... Work directly with business people rather than the general public. Sell to the people who already have the whole customer service end of it down, rather than trying to compete for market share with no experience.
Things are finally clicking into place.
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