Find stories in the business of gardening

After a few months of freak snowstorms, floods and southern chills, your readers may be eyeing those colorful gardening catalogues with even more optimism than usual.  Hoeing a row or two of beans will seem like a snap compared to slogging through slush and ice.

From houseplants to turf, from the odd rosebush to entire yards’ worth of vegetable vines, there are few American households that don’t contribute at least a bit to the nation’s $40 billion gardening economy each year.

The big trend these days is grow-your-own.  According to this February 2009 release based on National Gardening Association data,  food gardening for home consumption was expected to grow by 20 percent over 2008.

Edibles are expected to be big again this year, the Garden Writers Association predicts, noting that more than 7 million American households were new to food and herb growing in 2009.

The National Gardening Association,  an industry trade group, is a helpful source of research.

Interesting, informative business angles abound on the home gardening beat.  Very few retail sectors are unaffected, for example, from seasonal nurseries to big-box DIY stores to the local hardware chain and even supermarkets that sell bedding plants and bulbs for a few months each spring.

Garden Center Magazine, a regional trade journal, will help you with insight into how retailers are luring consumers this year, providing fodder for questions to ask your local bricks and mortar stores.  Gift shops, craft chains and other unlikely merchants also do a brisk garden trade – not just seeds and tools but books, knickknacks, gadgets, even T-shirts, charm bracelets and other accouterments that celebrate the nation’s most popular hobby.

If you have any mail-order companies in your area, or nurseries that operate online sales sites, check with them about sales outlook, popular items, weather issues and other elements affecting the bottom line.

Services such as landscaping, pesticide application, lawn maintenance, garden planning – all feature both corporate and grass-roots practitioners.

Look for the offbeat – scavengers who salvage and sell used brick for landscaping projects, cement companies that manufacture garden statuary, even companies that turn old plumbing fixtures and tires into retro planters.

Vintage garden tools are a hot seller at junk shops, antique stores and via online outlets like eBay, as are vintage gardening magazines and other ephemera.

And of course, home gardening is a picturesque and practical personal finance stories these days.  Talk with some local Master Gardeners (you can find them through your land-grant university’s extension service) about frugal planting.  Keep your eyes open for deals — I’ve seen horse farms selling (or giving away) manure and homeowners offering excess hosta and other fast-spreading landscaping plants at garage sales. Perennial and heirloom seed exchanges and community gardens are other consumer angles you might pursue.