number one: don't cut down your trees. whateverthe logger is going to give you is not worth what you can get from the medicinals underneath,especially on the north-facing side. so a typical cove, with a stream down the middle,one quarter of that land in that cove is suitable for ginseng. so there's certain places where,when you plant ginseng it's not a hardship to get it to grow because that's where itlikes and you just have to find that space that it likes and then it will just grow likeit normally does. an example of how humans can help the ginseng plant is that a plantby itself will produce a one percent rate of progeny and part of that's because it hasto go through an 18 month cycle and in the warm part of that cycle it tends to dry outand die. so if you put it in stratification
which is from fall to fall and then you plantit in the fall where it goes over the winter, the germination factor is in like the 80sand 90s. even if you were to come across a plant in the forest and you were to take outthe pulp and put in the seed 2 centimeters into the ground, at it's desired distance,it still has 18 months to come up and the chances of it growing even if you put it intothe ground is only about 16 percent. so stratification is the way that we as human beings can helpthis plant. i think it's really important to have a business plan. if you don't knowwhere you're going to sell and you don't know how many you're going to sell, then you reallyshouldn't get into this. anybody can grow a plant. anybody can put it into a pot butbeing able to sell that plant in the pot is
the trick and that's called marketing, andto help you along in that way, you really need a business plan to know all of the coststhat are associated with a business. first of all, the amount of money to come in issmall, but you're always going to have almost double value by selling a plant versus sellinga root. if you take that root and you put it into a process to create a new productout of it, then you can charge that extra price that would be equal to the plant orsometimes even greater. we sell a lot through the internet. a lot of it is finished products.you know dried roots we can sell all year round, capsules we can sell all year round.so those kinds of things that are not as time constrained as plants in the spring or rootsand seeds in the fall. it gives you a little
more of a business opportunity to spread outthrough the year at least into three seasons. i prefer, i actually like the lifestyle wherein the winter time everybody goes to sleep and the farmer can go off traveling and nothave to work. number one, people want to get rid of black plastic pots. they don't wantto put them in the landfill. a very small advertisement will usually - free - will getyou lots of pots. having compost, they put leaves on the sides of the road in no man'sland every fall that you could take and help the city so that they don't have to pick itup by creating compost. so you're going to get dirt, good forest dirt out of leaves andyou got the pots. then you have a plant rescue where you can get plants free by getting infront of the bulldozer and getting stuff done.
and then you just sit at a farmer's marketon a saturday...of course asheville is wonderful in that it has like 28 farmer's markets inour area where you can sit and sell these plants and make a living, you know. aftera while you become known for the plants and the trees and people will come to you andit takes a while to do that, but as a business, it doesn't take a lot of money and numbertwo, it's a great lifestyle because you're with plants. they don't talk back to you likepeople do.