How To Make Money In Your Backyard: 10 Useful Tips
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Are you looking for money making side hustles
and you happen to have a good size backyard laying there doing nothing except
needing mowing? Did you know that’s a money-maker out there? Put it to good use
with one or several opportunities to make money.
Here are 10 ways on how to make money
with your backyard:
1. Rental Home
Depending on your yard’s size and the
regulations in your area, you can build a rental home in your backyard for
extra monthly income.
As you’ve seen on television, tiny houses are all the rage these
days. Building
a tiny house can be costly (about $25,000 to $35,000), but a
cheaper alternative is to get a loft barn from Lowe’s for about $8,000 and convert
it yourself.
How much you can charge to rent depends on your area and whether you want to
rent it as a vacation spot (aka Airbnb), or long term. Guesthouses, cottages,
cabins on Airbnb charge anywhere from $25 to $150 a night.
Your rental property is considered a
business by the IRS and you’re to report all rent received and expenses paid.
You can deduct everything you spend on the rental, as long as it’s a necessary
and ordinary expense to own and operate a rental property.
2. Gardening
Having a garden is a great money saver
for your own home. Buy growing your own food you cut down on your grocery
bills, but why not take it a step further?
Plant more than you need and sell the
abundance. Get a booth at the local Farmer’s Market on Saturday’s and sell your
fruit, vegetables, and other wares (crafts you have created) for a good profit.
There’s no real extra work as you’re already doing it for your own family.
Some easy gardening methods are Gutter Gardening, and Square
Foot Gardening – these take little time and effort to maintain.
How much can you make with your
gardening depends on – what vegetables you grow, the Farmer’s Market booth
rental, the area you live in.
Let’s say you got 5 extra tomato plants for $5 each, each plant
yields about 20 pounds in which you sell for $4 a pound, the booth rental is
$30 for 5 Saturdays. $400 – $25 (plants cost) – $30 (booth) = $345made
on the tomatoes!
Of course, you just can’t have tomatoes
only, so do this for each extra food you provide and it can get pretty
profitable.
Gardening can be a risky business as its weather dependent, how much yield you
get from the plants, and any other natural occurrences – insects, animals,
wrong soil type and so on.
Do check with your city regulations, the
Farmer’s market rules (rent for a weekend or required for the whole season),
and health regulations regarding food.
3. Composting
If gardening isn’t your thing, or don’t
want to deal with the extra work of selling your extra food, you can try
composting.
Having a compost
pile for all your vegetable and organic waste as well as
shredded paper, leaves, and other bio gradable material can be turned into
black gold. Of course, this isn’t a money-maker right away, it takes anywhere
from 3 months to 2 years (depending on what you put in it, the weather, and how
much you turn it).
How much you can make depends on the size of your pile and the
batch size you sell it as, but the average I’ve seen is about $15
to $30 per cubic yard, which can cover a 10×10 area in 3” of
dirt.
4. Worm Farm
Combine your compost sales with a worm farm and make money with
both. Vermicomposting is
simply composting with earthworms. Earthworms speed up the composting process
as well as enhance the finished compost with nutrients and enzymes from their
digestive tracts. So, the composting material turns out to be richer and more
sought after, thus you can sell it for a bit more.
Add to your income by selling the worms during the summer for
fishing season, to other gardeners, or to pet owners. How much you can make
depends on the breed of worm – red worms can go for $3 for 100worms,
nightcrawlers can go for about $30 a pound.
You don’t even need a worm farm to sell
worms either, go out after a rainfall and pick them off the ground or go into
the forest and dig for them – instant cash.
5. Flowers
Save some of your compost and use it in
a large flower garden for profit.
Growing
flowers to sell to florists, grocery stores, at farmer’s
markets, at school fundraisers and a multitude of other ideas. Some of the most
popular flowers are Larkspur, Snapdragon, Peony, Sunflowers, and Zinnias.
A quarter acre of well-grown and marketed flowers is worth
approximately $6,250 to $7,500 in sales. It
can be risky, like gardening, it’s all weather dependent, growth rate, and
popularity at the moment.
6. Raise
Chickens
Yep, some city zonings allow chickens in the city (but many ban
roosters). If your area allows it, raising
chickens is a profitable side hustle in many different ways.
The overhead is pretty low if have a
simple chicken house and feed them your organic table scraps or let them
free-range for themselves.
Your first thought for raising chickens would be from selling
the eggs – a dozen brown eggs can bring in $2.50 to $5. But you can also
make money from:
·
Fertile eggs – If you’re
permitted a rooster then you can make money from fertile eggs for about the
same price as non-fertile eggs ($2.50 to $5), or more if it’s
a rare chicken breed or Quail.
·
Hatchlings – Hatch the
fertile eggs to be chicks and make about $3 – $5 per chick – more if you know
how to properly sex them.
·
Pullets/Layers – Raise new
chickens until they’re fully feathered (pullets), or are now laying their own
eggs (layers). Some people don’t want to deal with raising chicks and will pay
more for mature chickens, so you can make about $10 to $20 a bird.
·
Hens – Hens can only
lay eggs for a couple of years before their production slows or stops. Once
this happens you can either have free meat for your own freezer or sell them
for about $4 – $8 each.
·
Meat – Depending on
your area, you may be permitted to sell meat directly to customers, if so you
can make about $3 – $5 a pound, or $15
– $25 whole.
So, it can be pretty profitable, and
recyclable (new chicks for future layers). Just be sure to follow regulations,
licensing if required, and more.
7. Raise Bees
(or Rent to Beekeepers)
You can make money with bees in several
ways – renting out space for hives for beekeepers or raise your own bees.
Renting out space to beekeepers is
pretty easy, you just dedicate an area (away from your dwelling) and permit the
keepers to visit and maintain the hives. This would go great with your
flower-growing business as you have pollinators to help out. Renting to
beekeepers can make about $
Raising bees yourself takes more work but you can sell the
honey, the wax, and the new bees for a profit. One beekeeper blogger says he
makes about $4,000 a year selling
honey to his neighbors and selling bees to local farmers with only 2 hives on
his urban home.
Each hive of bees can produce anywhere from 20 to 60 pounds of
honey on average per year (depending on a variety of factors), which turns into
roughly $160
to $480 per hive ($8 a pound).
8. Sell Trees
There are two ways you can make money
selling trees and both take a lot of space, time and effort and both are
seasonal. You can sell firewood, or Christmas trees.
To sell firewood, you’ll need to live in a densely forested
area. You cut down dead trees on your property, chop them into firewood (or get a log
splitter).
Depending on your area and the type of wood it is you can make
about $120
and $180 for a cord (measures roughly four feet high by
four feet wide by eight feet long) of hardwood that is split and seasoned.
You can charge more for deliveries, and even more for stacking
the wood for the customer. Firewood is mostly a winter income, but you can sell
to campgrounds, hardware stores, farmers, and other places other than
individual consumers. The average earnings are about $1,500
to $2,500 part-time
Selling Christmas
trees, on the other hand, takes much longer to cultivate. You’ve got
to plow the land, start with seedlings (about 35¢ each), 1,500 trees per acre
of land, and 6 to 8 years to grow them.
In the meantime, if you want to get
your business started right away, find another tree farmer willing to sell you
trees in bulk and re-sell for a higher price.
Typically, a Christmas tree sells for about $25 to $100 or more.
One tree farmer says he averages around $15,000 to $30,000 every season.
There’s been a Christmas tree shortage in recent years so you can expect to
make more by raising the prices to meet demand.
9. Outdoor
Lessons
Again, if you have a large wooded area
and you love the outdoors and meeting people, consider teaching people outdoor
lessons – camping, outdoor cooking, survival skills and similar skills.
This will entail starting a company,
getting licensed and maybe passing inspection. But once that’s all completed,
the fun begins.
How much you can make depends on what you’ll be teaching. The
average salary of an Outdoor Skills Instructor is about $900
a week. An Outdoor Cook Instructor makes about $480
a week.
Note though that these are salaries
under established companies, how much you’ll actually make depends on your
efforts and your skills.
10. Rent it Out
Maybe you want something less
time-consuming? Maybe you don’t have the funds for a backyard rental property,
there are plenty of ways to rent out your backyard with very little work.
A few different rental ideas are:
Renting
to Campers
If you live near an attraction or
popular tourist site, you can rent out a portion of your backyard to travelers.
Sites such as HipCamp can list your backyard and your rental
rate for you and you just provide access. Campers pay directly through the site
and you get to keep 90% of the earnings. The bonus is that these sites also
provide insurance for your property for any liability or damages.
Rent
a Parking Spot
Rent out a spot for boats, trailers,
recreational vehicles, and other storage items. Many people are buying more and
more things but have less and less space to keep them. If you have a sizable
and secure backyard – rent it out to these folks.
Advertise on Craigslist, your local
classifieds, and even on social media in your town. A typical storage unit
rents outdoor parking spaces for $69 a month, you can charge the same or less.
If you offer a carport or covered space, you can charge more.
Rent
to Photographers
If you have a beautiful property and
landscaping, you can rent your space out to photographers to use as a photo
shoot site.
Photographers are always in need of a
variety of backgrounds to satisfy their clients. How much you can make varies
on what you have to offer in your backyard and where you are located.
Go further and rent to advertisers and film crews for
commercials, tv and movie backdrops. It’s possible to make about $2,000
a day. You do need to accept having a large group of people
trampling all over your place and this work is pretty sporadic as well.
These ten different ideas to make money
with your backyard is just a start. I hope I got you brainstorming for other
ideas to match your backyard and your skills.
Do you have other ideas? Let us know in
the comments here at Frugal for Less, as we love reading and gaining new ideas.
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Jillur Rahman
I'm Jillur Rahman. A full time web designer. I enjoy to make modern template. I love create blogger template and write about web design, blogger. Now I'm working with Themeforest. You can buy our templates from Themeforest.
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