3 Jan 2023

What Can Tissue Culture Do For Houseplant Businesses?

Anjali Singh, MS

As a content and community manager, I leverage my expertise in plant biotechnology, passion for tissue culture, and writing skills to create compelling articles, simplifying intricate scientific concepts, and address your inquiries. As a dedicated science communicator, I strive to spark curiosity and foster a love for science in my audience.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Which plant-related hobby was most picked up during the pandemic?

Gardening it is!!

This hobby increases the sales of gardening supplies by 9% in 2020. Even though the pandemic has shown a dramatic increase in indoor plant sales, the area has been exponentially growing for a decade. Many people, including millennials, have dipped their toes into the hobby of plant collection and gardening.

“So much whoop-de-doo for plants, which have been already around us! Why?” you might think.

It’s mainly because of the shrinking forests, increasing pollution, and occurring anxieties and stress in people because of today’s lifestyle and workload. The green plants serve as stress-buster! They soothe our mood, reduce anxiety, improve air quality and environmental wellness, and support cognitive health.

Now you might want to consider growing a houseplant empire for yourself, considering the heap of benefits you can get from the business. Right?

Let’s discuss in this article, how can you get started in the area, how these plants can be grown and maintained, and how tissue culture can be a transformational technique for your plant business.

Which Indoor Plants Are Most Popular?

Different houseplants are popular in different regions of the world. However, these five varieties can be commonly observed in indoor spaces:

• Croton: These plants are boldly marked with a splash of bright color foliage, such as orange, yellow, red, and black. It belongs to the family Euphorbiaceae. Some well-known varieties of Croton include Eleanor Roosevelt Croton, Florida Select Croton, and Gold Star Croton.
• Snake Plant: It’s an indoor plant popular for many generations. It belongs to the family of Asparagaceae and is native to tropical West Africa from Nigeria east to the Congo. There are many varieties of snake plants, and they all have sword-shaped leaves that are stiff, upright, and edged in gray, silver, or gold. In modern and contemporary interior designs, snake plants are a natural choice because of their architectural nature.
• Peace Lily: The peace lily bears broad, dark green leaves and elegant, white calla-like flowers above the leaves. It belongs to the family of Araceae and the genus Spathiphyllum. The genus has 47 species that are native to the tropical regions of the Americas and southeastern Asia. The flowers of the plant are spadix in yellow, white, and green spathe.
• Monstera: The plant got its name because of the split and holes in leaves. It’s a genus of 59 species belonging to the family of Araceae. It’s native to tropical regions of the Americas. The plant is also known as the swiss cheese plant.
• Lemon Lime Dracena: These plants light any indoor space. They are small, and bushy, and add vibrant texture to your living space. The plants belong to the family of Asparagaceae and are native to tropical Africa. Some commonly observed varieties of Dracena include Florida beauty Dracena, Lemon-lime, limelight Dracena, and Song of India Dracena.

How To Get Started Into Indoor Plant Business: 3 Tips

The indoor plant business consists of three components: growing plants, maintaining them, and selling plants. And, if you’re a green thumb, here’re three tips to consider before stepping into this business.

1. Prefer a technique that helps you grow plants at a large scale with a higher yield
   • If you’re not sourcing your plants from anywhere, the technique you use to grow the plant has a lot to do with your business. Today, a range of methods are available to grow plants on a commercial scale. Among them, some are traditional approaches, such as growing through seeds, cuttings, graftings, and layering. And, one advanced technique to grow the plant is tissue culture.

     All these techniques have different advantages and disadvantages. And, against the saying that “one size fits all”, not all technique support plant growth the same way. Thus, consider each of the techniques for your plants and study which will provide maximum benefit.

2. Conduct market research to understand what plants have crazy demands in your area
   • Before investing all your money in the business, do some preliminary research. For example, search what plants have huge demands in your area and what similar businesses like yours are doing, and where you see the gap. This gives you an idea of the services already available and what can add to get the edge in the market.
3. Start at a small scale, customize your customer’s demands, focus on quality, earn their trust and go big slowly
   • Starting small is the best advice in business. That way you don’t just blow your budget right out of the gate. It allows you the time to grow your customer base, understand their requirement, make some permanent ones by customizing their demands, earn their trust by providing the best of what you offer, and then grow your business at a slow pace.

Conventional Techniques To Grow Indoor Plants At Commercial Scale

Conventional or traditional techniques of growing plants include approaches that we are using for several decades, such as seeds, cutting, and grafting. These techniques serve different purposes, including producing hybrid crops, disease-free plants, uniform crops, and increasing the yield and productivity of plants.

These techniques allow you to produce exact clones of the plants with desirable traits if provided with similar conditions. With vegetative propagation techniques, like cutting and grafting, plants bypass the immature seedling phase and achieve maturity sooner.

Besides, their advantages, traditional techniques also have some disadvantages which you should consider before making your decision. Such as plants grown through traditional techniques are more prone to get infected, provide lower yield, require more labor and more maintenance, and require more space, and when grown through seeds, you will have problems with variations in plants with chances of introduction of unwanted traits.

Tissue Culture: The Magical Wand For Your Plant Business

If you want to grow plants in a small space, rapidly, independent of season, and produce disease-free plants. Then, tissue culture is your technique. It’s one of the advanced techniques that require only a few tissues of the plants to regenerate a whole plant under aseptic conditions.

The technique consists of four stages:

• Initiation phase: At this stage, the explant is collected from the mother plant, surface sterilized, and introduced in the tissue culture media to induce cell division in the explant and initial growth of the plant.
• Multiplication phase: The grown explant is transferred to a fresh medium containing plant hormones for shoot development. At this stage, after an explant reaches 1-3 cm in size, it’s divided again and subcultured again on the fresh medium—multiplication of the plant.
• Rooting phase: After shooting, the obtained shoots are transferred to a fresh tissue culture medium containing the rooting hormone, auxin, for root development.
• Acclimation phase: When plantlets are ready with roots, they are first acclimatized in greenhouse conditions for their survival in natural conditions.

Learn about the advantages and disadvantages the tissue culture technique offers in this article.

Indoor Plant Tissue Culture Master Class to Help You Grow Your Indoor Plat Venture

Tissue culture is now a popular technique among growers and plant businesses to grow plants at a commercial scale. It’s only because of the advantages it offers over the conventional approaches to growing plants, such as producing hybrid plants, disease-free plants, and the requirement of small space.

But, if you’re a beginner in the area and have no knowledge of tissue culture, incorporating this technique into your business model can be challenging. That’s why we bring a comprehensive indoor plant tissue culture master class curated to serve your tissue culture needs.

Our Houseplant tissue culture master class is a comprehensive course curated to prepare you with the knowledge and energy you need to kickstart your plant business. Though it will help you in an indefinite way, here are some advantages of it to name:

Training for the most advanced technology available today for plant propagation—tissue culture.

• Hands-on experience in tissue culture.
• Networking with like-minded people.
• Directly learn from an instructor having 15+ years of experience in the area.
• Get the answers to your questions instantly from the instructor.
• Learn how to build your small-scale or in-house lab or how to take your already established plant business to next level.
• Work on the plants and learn about the challenges and solutions on the spot with your instructor.
• Getting a certificate to demonstrate our expertise and knowledge about the tissue culture technique.

And, much more!

Interested in learning more about the course? Click here and get the answer to all your questions related to our master class!