BlogSmall growers
A price you can live on
Most small growers set their first prices by looking around: what the stall next door charges, what the box store has on its rack, what feels fair for a plant they grew themselves. It is an understandable place to start and a risky place to stay, because none of those numbers knows what your plants cost you. When Greenhouse Grower surveyed growers in 2016, it found prices were set at about 2.4 times cost on average, yet fertiliser, water, shrink, growth regulators and pest control were rarely counted in that cost, and the magazine called pricing off competitors "highly risky".
Start from what the plant really costs
A plant's cost has three parts, and the one most growers count is only one of them. Writing in Greenhouse Grower in 2018, Paul Fisher of the University of Florida put direct inputs, overhead and labour at roughly a third each of total greenhouse production cost, and warned that costing from direct inputs alone will greatly underestimate the total. Direct inputs are the pot, the soil, the plug and the fertiliser. Overhead is everything that keeps the place running whether or not a given plant sells, such as heat, water, the greenhouse, the truck, insurance and the losses. Labour is every hour of potting, spacing, watering and loading.
Count your own hours too. A cost of production worksheet from the University of Hawaii, written in 1987 and still sound, tells growers to include a salary for the operator at what it would cost to hire someone to do the job, or what the owner could earn elsewhere. A price that only works because you pay yourself nothing stops working the year you need help. For plants that stand for more than a season, the cost of keeping them matters as well, which our post on what a plant costs before anyone buys it works through.
Between the floor and the ceiling
Your total cost is the floor, and what your buyers will pay is the ceiling. Charlie Hall of Texas A&M describes pricing that way, and the space between the two is yours to decide. University of Florida extension guidance published in 2024 suggests growers aim for a gross margin of 30 to 40 percent and a profit margin of 10 to 15 percent.
Do not try to lower the ceiling by racing the box store. In Digger, the magazine of the Oregon Association of Nurseries, the garden centre consultant Ian Baldwin put it plainly: "you should not be going head-to-head with Home Depot." A small grower cannot win on price against a chain that buys by the trailer, but can win on what the chain does not offer, which is varieties it does not carry, plants grown nearby and someone who knows what will thrive in the buyer's garden.
Raising prices without losing buyers
Costs do not stand still. The AmericanHort index of prices paid by growers rose from 100 to 165 between 2007 and 2024, Hall reported in 2025, so a price that has not moved in years has in effect been cut. Review prices once a year, before the season, and raise them by group rather than across the board. Ellen Egan of Egan Gardens, quoted in the same Digger article, takes it as a sign to raise prices when customers keep telling her how reasonable they are.
Sprout keeps the cost of each plant next to its price, so the margin is in front of you whenever you change either one. Price levels give wholesale and landscaper buyers their own prices, with quantity breaks, and when the yearly rise comes you can pick the plants and move a level by a percentage or an amount in one go, rounded to tidy figures. A grower with one price list sees the margin on every plant from the first day, and a nursery with several kinds of buyer changes them all in one sitting.