Its a good idea to have some sort of income when retired. Passive income is the holy grail. You know the income that just keeps flowing in with out any effort. With this kind of income there are no worries about out living your savings and there is the extra benefit of having something left to give to your loved ones.
When studying the tree farm idea, the financials seemed interesting. Here was an investment that appreciated with time. Every foot that the tree grew meant it was worth more. What makes a tree have value? The reason is because people desire mature trees to make their yards look beautiful but do not want to wait the amount of time it takes them to grow.
Its a good idea to grow trees that grow well in your area. Since I'm in Florida, palm trees grow well and this is what I started with. There are so many palm trees in my area that it is fairly easy to take a walk and find a tree to collect seeds from. Here are a few pictures of the palm trees that I collected seeds from to start growing. From left to right (Alexander, Queen, Bismark, Date)
I thought about selling the seeds I found on eBay but I realized there may be some legal issues. Sending seeds across state lines may be problematic due to the agricultural department regulations. I know that they don't like citrus to cross state lines due to diseases like canker. Also in the state of Florida they want you to become a seed dealer and get a license. Anyway, because the red tape I was discouraged and didn't not pursue this.
I pursued the tree farm idea instead and started looking for larger parcels of land that were inexpensive. Large parcels nearby were few and far between and cost millions. However 10 acres could be found in my price range about an hour away. But the distance made me wonder how often I would have to take this drive. Really if you have a farm you want to live on the farm to tend to it.
Nevertheless I was still excited about the tree farm idea and decided to start growing the palms on my property. I purchased some used black plastic pots and filled them with cow manure and top soil and planted the seeds. Some websites suggest that you take the fruit off the seed but this takes a long time so I just planted the seeds as mother nature provided them to me. I planted about 15 seeds per pot. It wasn't long before I had 150 palm trees growing. I must have had 10 different varieties. For a video on how to grow palm trees see this one.
I was excited about how much these trees could sell for. For example consider 10 year old date palm which sells for $650 at this link. That one tree earned $65 per year. Imagine having 1500 trees on a farm, the farm would grow in value by 100,000 dollars per year. In ten years it would be worth 1 million dollars. Wow! Only 10 years to become a millionaire! The tree farm of course is a lot of work. Not only is there tending to the trees but then there is also finding a buyer. There are risks too. What if a hurricane comes or a disease strikes and they all die. I'm no expert on what it takes to operate a tree farm but maybe some day I'll talk to one.
Anyway back to my seedlings, I felt the need to water them even though palm tress seem to do fine with the rain water that god provides. I realized I may not be available to water them every day so to solve this I added some sprinklers tied to my automatic timer. I no longer had to perform the watering task. I also came up with a method to keep the weeds from growing around the plants by putting the pots on top of landscape fabric. See my setup below:
Early on I found I needed to separate the seedlings into their own pots and after a year I found that I needed to replenish the dirt in the pots. I encountered many night crawlers that had taken up residence in the pots. Maybe I should have opened up a bait store.
I did have trouble with squirrels. They dug up the seeds and ate them. I tried capturing them in a trap I purchased from Lowes. It was fun trapping these critters and even though I have eaten squirrel before I decided to relocate it to another area. But then another squirrel took up residence in the yard and I was back to where I started. Below you can see the troublesome critter in his jail cell.
The task of tending to the seedlings and starting a tree farm, got sidelined by my next new interest, remodeling my house. I have been remodeling the house now for about 2 years and have finished, converting a single car garage into a two car garage, building a cedar covered porch and a boat house with a lift. All that is left to finish the permits is to put in a paver driveway which I am working on now.
Because of the construction the automatic sprinklers for the palms were off due to the damage to the sprinkler system when tearing up the drive way. And so its been two years that those seedling have gone without water except rain water. Out of the 150 seedlings I had, I ended up with about 40 left. Some died because they were completely covered over with banana tree leaves and had no light. The 40 seedlings are doing well and have grown despite the very little dirt left in the pot. See picture below of the Alexander palms.
Due to my getting sidelined on the dream of owning a tree farm, I thought that I would never use the seedling palm trees I grew because I had nowhere to plant them. However, my attention has turned to landscaping my yard and I have realized that there are many places for these trees in my very own yard. What this amounts to is about $650 worth of palm trees to choose from for the yard. They were not exactly free since I paid money for the pots, manure, fabric, sprinklers and topsoil but that was probably about $150. This means that I have enjoyed a savings of 77% just for the plants and additional savings by taking care of the landscaping myself..
Cue the cash register sound.
Happy Building
The Dr.
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