148 FRITZ BAHR'S COMMERCIAL FLORICULTURE 



Get the principal of your public school interested in the planting 

 of more fruit trees and let him get the "kids" interested. Furnish 

 some small trees each Spring for the children at cost, and let them 

 plant them. It helps you in business; it helps the children who 

 plant them; and it helps the whole community you live in. 



Every little home with a 50-ft. front has room for three 

 or four fruit trees, and there is hardly a spot East or West, South 

 or North where, if given just a little attention, fruit of some kind 

 cannot be grown. 



Your nurseryman will supply you in Spring with small trees, 

 ranging from J^-in. in diameter or thereabouts, upward. The 

 smaller the better, really, as long as they have good roots. The 

 branches should be cut to one or two eyes from the little trunk at 

 planting time and during the first year about six shoots should be 

 allowed to grow. What you don't sell, plant out four feet apart 

 in rows on your own grounds where you can lift them again the 

 following year or later. Don't bother with doubtful varieties; 

 you cannot grow everywhere a Delicious Apple or a Bartlett Pear or 

 an Elberta Peach. The fancy fruits will always be grown only by 

 experts, but there are usually varieties which are known to do well 

 in a section which may be not the best for eating and yet be 

 valuable for cooking, preserving or canning. And that, in most 

 cases, is recommendation enough. 



SEED SELLING 



TTHIS could be made a profitable side line by the average florist 

 * in many a town. 



There are ever so many communities all over the country 

 where a florist is conducting a retail establishment in connection 

 with his greenhouses where a side line could be worked up with 

 seeds. It is just a matter of going after the business. 



Many of the larger seed houses place cases of seed packets in 

 grocery and hardware stores, and while a little is sold in that way, 

 no one has a better chance than the local florist to make a real 

 business of it and handle and sell not only flower seeds but vegetable, 

 grass, and perhaps farm seeds, too, according to his locality. 



Is there money in doing so? Of course there is. The very 

 fact that you have people come in to get a five-cent packet of Lettuce 

 seed means a prospective buyer of something else. Anything that 

 tends to make people come into your establishment pays. But 

 there is more to it than that ; wherever there are homes and home 

 grounds seeds of every description are, wanted and a fair margin of 

 profit can be -made by handling them. — 



It isn't hard for a florist who uses and sows seeds of all kinds 

 himself to take up the retailing of seeds. From a small beginning 



