Some years the harvest is simply huge. Anyone who can no longer keep up with the food can also sell their harvest. There are a few things to keep in mind though.
Gardening can be very relaxing. Anyone who likes to work outdoors often sees working in their own garden as an excellent balance to the stress of everyday life. A large garden can also be the ideal occupation for pensioners. Exercise in the fresh air keeps you fit and the creative possibilities offered by garden design can be better exploited with enough time and leisure.
For some people, however, their garden is much more than just an active hobby. You can definitely make money with gardening. If you find the right niche for yourself, you can sell your green thumb. Above all, products such as fruit, vegetables and other plants that have been grown in one's own garden are very popular today and usually find enthusiastic buyers. Great riches do not always beckon, but there are definitely ways to improve the household budget with a productive garden. This is how passion and livelihood can be cleverly combined.
Order is not only necessary in the vegetable patch
Hobby gardeners with a business-minded idea should be aware of one thing: Even on a small scale, income from gardening activities may be taxable and should therefore be registered with the trade office. Those who inform themselves in detail beforehand can save themselves a lot of trouble and are on the safe side with their idea of turning their beloved hobby into money.
In principle, the local trade office is responsible when it comes to registering a side job in the field of gardening and landscaping. The legislator has created the legal basis for this in Section 14 (1) GewO at https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de. Anyone who passes on fruit and vegetables, plants, seedlings or plant seeds directly and unprocessed to the customer is acting within the framework of so-called primary agricultural production.
For the sale of the products, an activity should nevertheless be carried out at the responsible trade officebe registered. Those who sell as a secondary activity to an employment relationship are usually exempt from trade tax. However, tax payments as part of the income tax for the generated turnover are only required if a fixed minimum limit per year is exceeded. Income from secondary employment is currently exempt from income tax up to EUR 410 per year.
If, in addition to the pure products from the garden, processed products such as jam or cakes are also to be sold, a business registration is absolutely necessary. In addition, the products must meet various requirements and comply with specified purity requirements. The website of the Bavarian State Office for He alth and Food Safety provides detailed information on this topic at https://www.lgl.bayern.de. As a rule, special requirements do not have to be met in the case of a so-called small business.
Tax return for enterprising hobby gardeners
❖ Accounting Software
If you do your tax return yourself despite having a side business, you are well advised to use professional accounting software. Here, all private and business finances can be clearly separated from each other and main and secondary activities can also be listed separately. It is also possible to capture receipts digitally. In this way, all accounting processes can be optimally prepared, even if the annual tax return is handed over to a tax consultant.
Professional accounting programs have the advantage that they are very user-friendly. Established brands also have the advantage that the purchase of the software itself can be claimed for tax purposes. The guide at https://shop.lexware.de.
explains which accounting programs can be deducted from the tax and how the claim is correctly booked.❖ POS system
The choice of the right POS system for sales is up to the trader himself. From fully automatic cash registers to simple booking systems, there are numerous variants. What is important, however, is the possibility of being able to issue a receipt to the customer on request, and the goods sold and the income generated with them must also be properly booked for the tax office. In the case of farm shops and similar businesses, the tax office requires daily bookings, which means that the daily income must be individually retrievable and verifiable. Most of the very small and simple POS systems allowthis form of booking.
When it comes to receipts for your own expenses, however, mobile software can be very practical. Modern accounting software often offers a feature that allows receipts to be scanned directly via an app and processed for accounting purposes. With the purchase of the software, the associated receipt entry app is often free of charge. For example, receipts can be scanned directly in the hardware store and added to the accounting program. User-friendly programs such as https://www.lexoffice.de also offer the service that the documents are automatically categorized and saved for later accounting processing.
Sell produce from your own garden
The first and probably the easiest way to earn a little extra money with your own garden is probably to sell the products you have grown yourself. This can be traditionally home-grown fruit and vegetables, but also other products such as flowers, plant seedlings, plant seeds or processed things such as home-made bouquets, wreaths or the like.
A well-kept garden usually rewards its gardener with rich yields, which, depending on the size of the garden, can far exceed your own needs. If family and friends are already plentiful and the fruit trees and vegetable patch are still bending under their bounty, selling nature's bounty might be worth considering. Fresh groceries directly from the region are enjoying increasing popularity and many people are happy today if they can buy their fruit and vegetables directly from the producer and get an idea of the cultivation conditions. Gardening enthusiasts with a green thumb can take advantage of this and sell their plants and their products fresh from the tree or directly from the vegetable patch.
Even processed products from our own production can be turned into money in this way. Homemade jam is always very popular, as is applesauce. Those who like to bake can certainly not only look forward to enthusiastic customers for fresh fruit cakes at the weekend. This is a particularly pleasant way to combine hobbies and part-time work.
Farm shop, vegetable stand and co.
It doesn't always have to be your own farm shop. A small storage room is often sufficient, in which the products can be temporarily stored and sold to interested parties. Many a hobby gardener has a small sales table in the garageor started in the gazebo. When the small business grows and thrives like the garden itself, the premises can always be changed. It doesn't really take much to be able to receive the first customers. Ideally, there should be an on-site facility to weigh or measure the goods for sale in order to calculate prices. Since the eye is always there, the garden fruits should always be easy to examine. Fruit, vegetables and other products can be presented naturally in wooden boxes or on shelves. This creates a market stall atmosphere in no time at all.
If you don't want to pay in advance for packaging materials, you can also ask your customers to bring their own containers for transport for the sake of the environment. This means that there are almost no costs for opening your own small sales stand and the sale of the rich harvest can immediately improve the household budget. At the same time, the risk of a loss-making business is reduced if a harvest is not so profitable or if customer interest leaves much to be desired in a year's time. With the lowest possible financial investment, every tomato sold is a net profit and selling is a lot of fun.
Hobby gardeners who want to make sales more professional can of course set up a small farm shop. Simple shelves usually already serve their purpose. However, they should be quite stable, since crops of all kinds usually bring a certain weight with them. When it comes to decoration at the vegetable stand and in the farm shop, the following applies above all: less is more. The colorful products for sale here mostly speak for themselves and don't need to be trumped by additional decorations. A few fresh flowers, a seasonally braided wreath or a few wooden objects are all you need, because naturalness and naturalness are what make a farm shop so appealing.
Self-service desired
Gardens where you can pick and harvest yourself are also particularly popular. Families with children who do not have their own garden like to use the opportunity to do a bit of tinkering in nature and to harvest what they have bought themselves. This is fun and at the same time brings many hard-working harvest hands who can help with the gardening.
What has long been offered as a special highlight in larger farms and plantations can also be used on a smaller scale in the home garden. Promise summer and autumn oneparticularly rich harvest, happy harvest afternoons can be announced in the neighborhood. The harvested fruits can of course be tasted on the spot and taken home in the desired quantity for a lower purchase price.
A campaign like this can contribute to a successful start with your own farm shop. Sellers and customers get to know each other better and word gets around about the new shopping opportunity. After all, positive word of mouth is still the best advertising, especially in regional retail.