Gardening Profits From Gloxinias

When it comes to growing for profit, gloxinias (sinningias) have two real advantages: They are among the showiest of flowering pot plants and they also make excellent “specializing” material. The heaviest flowering of these gesneriads occurs during the warm months, but staggered plantings will produce some flowers the year round, so plants are almost always salable. Colors range from purest white through blues and purples to the brightest red. There are selfs, bicolors, margined varieties, and some with speckles and dots. There are older varieties with narrow tubular throats and modern hybrids with large wide faces and nodding “slippers” large and small.

Is the Gloxinia Business for You?
Many amateur and professional growers have found gloxinias profitable. Some specialize in seeds, some in tubers. Others carry the plants through the season, selling thousands at Easter and on Mother’s Day. Huge plants, grown for these special occasions, retail for about $25.00 apiece.

Gloxinias also attract collectors. If you sell by mail, you can interest them through a little two- or three-dollar ad in a specialized publication, such as The Gloxinian or The African Violet Magazine. Keep up with things through the American Gloxinia Society, and its magazine. Membership is $2.50 per year. Address: Edith McDonald, Secretary, 310 East 71st St., New York 21, New York.

From My Greenhouse
When I first began selling, I vended small potted gloxinias, in bud only, in 3-inch pots to local plant counters. Today I sell only species tubers and those from my crosses between species and large-flowered hybrids, most of them directly to a commercial seed house which also orders gloxinia seed. The species seem most popular, followed closely by the hybrid slippers.

You will find that standard varieties are always in demand. The older ones were hybridized in Europe and today commercial dealers here still obtain many of these varieties from foreign sources. Since European growers have low labor costs, they are able to sell below most American dealers.

You pay the wholesaler $7.50 to $35.00 per hundred tubers, depending on the tuber size. You can retail small ones for about 30 cents each; the giants will bring 75 cents to $1.25 each, depending on the market.

For Collectors
The newer hybrid forms appeal most to collectors. Flowers are wide-throated, open-faced, in a great array of colors. Although no yellow gloxinia has been developed, there are a number with yellow throats, and there is plenty of variety with which to stock your greenhouse. I know of only a few firms selling doubles, so if you discover any among your seedlings, it would pay you to reproduce them.

Popular with collectors are the species. These have downward-facing, slipper-type flowers and pouchlike corollas. Sinnin-gia speciosa, the blue slipper and its varieties, have fair sized slipper-type flowers in blue, purple, white, and rose, and plain green leaves. S. macrophylla, commonly called Brazilian gloxinia, has olive-green leaves red beneath and nodding purple flowers; regina is similar; S. eumorpha displays dangling white bells among shiny green leaves. Baby of them all is S. pusilla with leaves scarcely an inch long and tiny quarter-inch blue-purple flowers. The largest of the species, S. tubiflora, has pointed silvery-green leaves and fragrant white flowers resembling nicotiana.

Schedule for Tubers
If you are starting with tubers, plant them in February for June to July flowers and give a daytime temperature of 70 to 80 degrees with the usual 10-degree drop at night. Start tubers in any light soil, peatmoss, sphagnum moss, or vermiculite. As soon as they show growth, move to 4-inch pots. For maximum flowering, they require subsequent shifts to 5- or 6-inchers, depending on size of tuber.