Egon,
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I do have confidence and faith in myself. I would love to work for myself. I make good money and have great benifits where i work, but im so sick and tired of making someone else rich and putting up with coe workers grief. It makes a body old fast dealing with the same old Sh&% different day syndrome.
Thanks, Larry
>> Wow, that is a bit much. I pay 25.00 per week for blue choice health plan.
That's just your share, your employer is probably paying another $50 - $100 week also.
Regarding your question, The plan is a HMO, providers and rates vary by county. I don't think the plan includes Dental. I looked at it, but my wife has coverage through her job right now which we use. The cost isn't that bad compared to what you might pay as an individual. Once you start to look at the costs of paying for your own benefits, the employer's share of Social Security and Medicare, Workers Comp, pension if you have it, etc..., you get a much better sense of what your time is really worth to your employer. It can easily be 40% greater than your hourly rate. Another option regarding insurance can be catastrophic care coverage - you pay all routine expenses and the insurance only kicks in on really big ticket expenses.
Regarding the nursery business, good luck, part time at the beginning sounds like the way to go. If you haven't done it yet, start to survey and map your competition. Drive around and take a look at all of the other nurseries and see what they're offering, prices and how much traffic they have. You mentioned in another post that you do some handyman work - start to talk to your customers and let them know what you're doing and what you'll have available. They may buy a little and since they know you, they may mention your name to their friends.
Since you have a year, start checking the auction listings and also check with businesses which may have surplus equipment if they want to sell anything. I was at a nursery auction last fall where a fully equipped 26X56 greenhouse sold for ~$1,100.00. Cold frames will often sell for ~$300-$400 ea. Any dollars you can save here are $$ which you can use elsewhere or as working capital to fund the business.
I'm not sure what county you are in, but Wayne County has set up an Agriculture micro-enterprise program. They offer below market rate loans and start-up assistance to agriculture related businesses. If you check with Co-operative Extension they can connect you with the program.
I Thank you on the info on the co-op programs. I did a search and found ours in Ontario County. Found lots of good info there. I put in a question on business plans on my subject. They do help with what im looking at. This could be a start in the right direction. Thanks for the info, Larry
<font color="blue"> the cat took them inside and he had 5,000 worms imbeded in his living room carpet. </font color>
[img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
That is pretty funny - especially because one of my "indoor" cats got out last week and I had to tear up the lower step on my front porch to get him back. I know the pain...
I'm going to use them primarily to produce compost but will start putting them into the ground when I get enough "castings" (worm babies). I've got a couple of boxes set up in the garage and will feed them kitchen compost. I'll see how that goes and - well, this isn't exactly the originial plan [img]/forums/images/icons/wink.gif[/img] so I will change things as needed.
The worms are here. I just got them today. They're carefully locked up in the garage where there shouldn't be any critters. Hopefully I won't find any on the living room floor [img]/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img]. Got the box almost ready for them - hope they survive long enough for me to get them in there.
For some reason, I don't have many worms in my soil. Not sure why - it looks like decent soil, but on the other hand a lot of the soil in this area is very rocky. I've got kind of a valley that has built up what I hope is a good layer of soil on top of the rocks that I'm sure are under me (I find lots of granite "dust" in my well's prefilter all the time, so I know there's rock under there).
Here is something I did not know until this week. There was
an article talking about how DISTRUCTIVE earthworms can
be!! [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img] Apparently, in some ecosystems earthworms
are not native and are very distructive. The article was
talking about MN I think. The forests expect are certain
amount of leave litter, duff, to build up. Animals use the duff
to live in and need the stuff to survive. Earthworms eat up
the duff and removed the material from the forest. The
scientists are still trying to figure out how big of a problem
this is. The state has created regs to prevent the release of
earthworms from people fishing. [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img] The scientists
are doing surveys to see how far the earth worms have
spread.
I'm pretty sure the article was in one of this weeks Wall
Street Journal issues.
I thought earthworms where all over the place.....
Well, the worm farming thing didn't work for me. Not sure where it went wrong, but the short story is that I got 'em and they may or may not have sat in the mailbox for a couple of hot days (depending on whether I'm right or my wife is, and she's always right [img]/forums/images/icons/wink.gif[/img] so therefore they did *not* sit in the sun). When I opened them up, there were two bags of what looked like plain 'ol soil.
I put the contents of the bags in a box with some compost material and newspaper and kept it damp (not wet) for a couple of weeks. Then I decided to check them out more closely. No worms - just compost [img]/forums/images/icons/confused.gif[/img].
Anyway, I dumped that in the compost pile, so at the very least I have added good stuff to the pile. There might be worms there, too, but I didn't notice any new ones.
I'm pretty sure they got cooked before I got ahold of them, though. I may try again someday, but for now it turned out that, as I feared, that I have some of the world's most expensive compost [img]/forums/images/icons/frown.gif[/img].
A sad story, I think. Chalk it up to lack of experience or knowledge, or something [img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img].
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