Out of pure love for plants, Jalal Sikder of Rajbari started a rooftop garden with just four cacti. He is now a successful young entrepreneur. As the nursery business proved profitable, he left his NGO job to make it his full-time profession, and his nursery now runs on a commercial scale.

Jalal's four gardens, including Rose Garden, hold 5 to 6 lakh saplings of about 3,500 local and foreign fruit, forest, medicinal and other species, the report says. The nursery also has seedlings of about 300 species of flowers.

The nursery sells an average of Tk 15,000 to 20,000 worth of saplings a day. After all expenses, Jalal now earns more than Tk 2.5 lakh a month. Seeing his success, many others are turning to new gardens and nurseries.

Rose Garden nursery has about 250 kinds of fruit saplings, including about 50 types of mango such as Banana, Kiujai and Palmal; five types of apple including Harimon 99, Anna, Red and Kashmiri; grapes; strawberries; eight or nine types of guava including Thai; ten types of jujube including Falguni, Balsundari, Kashmiri and Apple Kul; and pomegranate, coconut, date, and malta. It also has about 22 to 23 medicinal species, including Torit Chandal and Rahu Chandal, and seven or eight forest tree species.

The nursery also stocks more than 300 species of flowering plants, including frangipani, nilkantha, gardenia, beli, jasmine, Thai hibiscus and rose.

Buyers crowd the Rose Garden mixed nursery at Bhabanipur in the district town every day for saplings to decorate offices, schools and homes, and to make gardens and rooftop gardens. Hundreds of buyers and visitors come each day. Between 25 and 26 workers earn their living there, looking after the garden and the saplings. They say many people come to buy saplings and many come just to look, and that every kind of flower, fruit and medicinal sapling is available.

Buyers say they come because every kind of sapling is available at Rose Garden, though prices are a little high.

Jalal Sikder said he used to work for an NGO called Uddipan in Dhaka. He had loved plants since childhood. As a hobby, in 2013 he bought four cacti at the Dhaka trade fair and planted them on his rooftop.

A year later he sold Tk 35,000 worth of seedlings from them, and his love of plants grew further. While still in his job, in late 2016 he set up a malta orchard on four bighas at Gangaprasadpur in Mizanpur, in his home district of Rajbari.

Seeing people's interest in saplings, he then set up four gardens including Rose Garden and began collecting flower, fruit, forest and medicinal saplings of different species from home and abroad. About two years later, in 2018, he saw success and began selling flower, fruit and other saplings commercially from Rose Garden. With the nursery profitable, he left his NGO job in late 2019 to take up the nursery business as his profession. His Rose Garden mixed nursery now covers seven acres.

Md Bahauddin Sekh, Rajbari Sadar upazila agriculture officer, said the nursery business is profitable. The district has more than 40 nurseries large and small, and new gardens and nurseries are being set up in the municipal area, including Jalal's, and in places such as Chandani, Alipur and Khankhanapur.

He said Jalal is one of the leading young entrepreneurs and has become a successful nursery owner in a short time, creating jobs for many. Besides training, he and the field-level sub-assistant agriculture officers have helped with advice. Following Jalal's example, many people are now keen to set up nurseries and gardens.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.