We wrote a large article on how to make the best indoor garden greenhouse for anyone in nearly any living situation. It covered apartments, basements, kitchens and more. You can see it at this link: Click Here!
The thing is, you can set up an indoor greenhouse and grow decorative plants or food just about anywhere. I even met a couple that traveled full time in a van that had a greenhouse that they pulled out and put outside every time they stopped.
Yes, you got it, when they travel, it goes inside the van. It was quite an ingenious set up. Sure, it wasn’t very big, but they grew tomatoes, strawberries, cucumbers, zucchini and a couple of other things in there too.
Just about any living space will do, and you can adapt yours to nearly any environment you can think of.
So, below we are going to answer the other questions that people have asked us for a long time and since we put up that other article which you can read here. It will open in another window, so you won’t lose your place here. Click Here! For the other article.
The questions below are not in any particular order and are very interesting questions. So, be sure to read each question (sub-title) to discover the answer to the ones you’re interested in.
What Are The Biggest Indoor Greenhouse Benefits?
This is a great question and one that we could write a book about, however, we’ll just cover some of the main points below.
1. You know where your food came from and exactly what’s in it. There is literally nothing as important in maintaining great health than knowing what you’re putting into your body and where it came from.
So many so-called organic farms are located right next door to a farm that sprays. The wind blows that stuff on your food, the insects from their area fly over an pollinate your crops. It’s a real mess.
Knowing what’s going into your body is critical to achieving optimal health.
2. Reducing stress. It’s pretty difficult to be stressed out when you’re in your beautiful greenhouse surrounded by incredible green plants that are soothing your eyes and soul. You’re handling them, feeling super high-quality earth on your fingers, standing barefoot if you like, connected to the earth.
The sun is shining, you’re harvesting your very own vine ripened produce that you know is going to taste amazing and you simply can’t wait to wash it and eat it.
The meal you’re going to prepare for either yourself or loved ones and friends is going to be raved about and you feel… Connected
Very difficult to be stressed out when you’re feeling this good.
3. You reduce your carbon footprint by composting, growing your own food, not using chemical pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers.
These all help lessen your impact on the earth and make your presence less of a burden on mother earth.
This is not new age, it’s just common sense. Even dogs don’t poop where they eat, but for some strange reason people do. And we’re supposed to be the intelligent ones? Yeah, right.
Lowering your impact is good for you, the environment and the children. So, if you can do it and enjoy it at the same time, why not?
Can I Turn My Indoor Greenhouse Into A Business?
Sure, you can and at many different levels. Of course, you’ll have to follow all local rules, laws and guidelines, but the answer is yes, it sure can be done and here are a few ways that you can do it.
Plus, the next 2 sub-headline questions on mushrooms and garlic really go into 2 much more profitable models that you can think about and possibly go for.
1. You can grow produce for local friends and acquaintances that you deliver to them, or they pick up on a schedule and pay for. This method will typically only bring in a little extra money but is super easy to set up and run out of your home.
2. You can become part of a co-op where people from the co-op order and the co-op then places the big order with you and then the co-op distributes the foods so that you don’t have to deal with individual transactions.
3. You could set up a roadside fruits and vegetables stand where you sell your wares to the public.
By cutting out the middleman you can dramatically increase your profits and lower quite a few of your costs.
This would however take up your time sitting there selling produce or you could hire someone else to do that part.
Now, there are two really hot ways to turn your indoor garden greenhouse into a veritable cash machine. We are going to go over them below.
However, before we can do that, we must give you this disclaimer: Opportunities are just that, opportunities. There are no guarantees of income stated or implied. Your results will be based solely upon your own efforts and are not something we have or even want control over.
With that being said, let’s get growing.
Can You Make Money With Indoor Greenhouse Mushroom Farming?
Why yes, yes you can, and a lot of it we might add.
Just as a couple of examples white Truffles are worth around $7 a gram. No, not per pound, but per gram. At that rate they would run $3,178 per pound.
So, as you can see truffles growing can be rather profitable, but what about other mushrooms?
Here are 4 more that can have you sprouting cash all over the place.
The below figures are in USD.
Yartsa Gunbu $2,000 an ounce.
Matsutake $1,000 to $2,000 per pound.
Morels $254 a pound.
Chanterelles $224 a pound.
There are plenty more varieties that you can grow all the way to the button mushrooms that you see so commonly at the grocery store.
They all have different prices per pound, however most if not all are or can be quite profitable.
In fact, you don’t really even need a greenhouse to grow mushrooms as they actually grow quite well in the dark.
I know of one man who grows a few varieties for local restaurants in one room of his house and makes over $200,000 per year doing it.
He contracts with a local food service company to deliver the orders all over his city so that he can dispense with all the costs of delivery vans, drivers, insurance etc.
He just pays them per order delivered and that’s it. No monthly overhead, no payrolls to deal with, just a fixed cost per order in different zones of the city. I.E. zone 1 is X price zone 2 is XY price and zone 3 is XYZ price as an example.
I don’t know him personally, but I know of another guy that sells dried mushrooms all over the world and does very well for himself.
He grows and dehydrates them himself, weighs and packages them and ships them all by himself so I’ve heard.
I’m sure you could hand all those tasks off to other people and then spend your time marketing to grow the business. However, some people would rather do it all themselves.
It’s completely up to you. If you’re a control freak and no one else can do a good enough job at any phase or part of the business, then you will always be running a small business based solely on what you can do in a day.
However, if you can train others to do most of the labor and you work on the big picture of growing the business then you can expand without limits. It’s up to you.
The second business that is highly profitable and can be done in an indoor greenhouse will be the topic of the conversation below.
This too can really make some extra cash if you do it right and work at it.
None of these income ideas will magically happen by themselves, they all take effort and are purely governed in fruition by the effort you put in.
That being said….
Can You Grow Garlic In An Indoor Greenhouse For A Profit?
The answer to that is yes and here are the basics.
1. You really need to know which variety of garlic sells the most and goes for the most per pound.
Sure, you can grow garlic that has no demand and be sitting there with piles of it just aging, but not selling.
There are many varieties that sell for a good price per pound and elephant garlic is one of them.
Many garlic varieties can earn you around $10 per square foot of growing space per quarter, which can be a lot in a greenhouse as we will discuss later. However, it’s possible to double or even triple that with elephant garlic up to as much as $30 per square foot. That’s not guaranteed, but it can happen and has for many growers.
One of the reasons you can make so much more in a greenhouse is that you can have racks and grow the garlic in trays. A 300 square foot greenhouse with three tiers can be turned into about a 900 square foot greenhouse.
Then your growing season is rotating the crop every 3 months or 4 times per year (once per quarter).
Doing the math shows you that you could earn as much as $108,000 per year from a small little 300 square foot greenhouse.
That’s 300 sq feet X 3 layers = 900 sq feet.
$30 per sq foot X 4 times per year = $108,000
If you did a much larger space, then of course you could make more than that. With a smaller space, less of course.
This just gives you a realistic ballpark of what the potential is.
Currently at the time of writing we happen to know that the demand for certain garlic varieties are outpacing the supply by a considerable margin.
It’s a relatively easy business to get into because garlic once planted doesn’t need much maintenance at all. Sure, sunlight, watering and weeding, but that’s about it.
Garlic has few natural pests and if grown in an indoor garden greenhouse they are going to have to figure out how to even get in first. So, the pest problems should be at a pretty bare minimum.
One of the supreme advantages if growing garlic is that you don’t have to sell all of your crop within 24 hours after harvest. In fact, aged garlic goes for even more money.
You have to clean it and dry it, so it stores really well. This way you can sell it over time and make sure to always get your best price.
They don’t have you over a barrel because you have to get rid of it quick.
You have them over the barrel because you can take your time or even skip their offer and sell to a better offer.
There are not too many things you can do that with. Most food crops have to be sold fast. In fact. they are actually pre-sold. So, they are harvested they are shipped, and the grower bills the distributor on a price per pound basis.
With garlic you could, if you wanted to, sit on your product and every time the price goes up, you sell.
The price of most things are fluctuating and you can take advantage of that by always moving your product at the higher price.
The above were just two ways that you can turn your indoor greenhouse into a side hustle of a full-time gig. It’s up to you, the sky is the limit.
More than anything else, have fun!
Sources
1. https://moneyinc.com/the-five-most-expensive-mushrooms-in-the-world/
2. https://www.profitableplantsdigest.com/top-14-faqs-about-growing-gourmet-garlic-for-profit/