I opened Tree Frog Nursery in Rougemont NC last April. It has been a challenging first year considering the drought among many other things. Business was slow and I was not able to pour funds into it right away until I made money. I have a lot of horticulture and business background but never owned a business before so to open on a year as this was more than I bargained for. I wasn't lucky to have family in the business to teach me what to do or give me land and equipment so everything has been from scratch. We sit on an old 36 acre farm with a pond and an old house (circa 1850). The house was practically about to fall part and the two barns also were also loosing the battle to stay up. I needed to fix things up in the house and barns to use as an office and storage but the amount of fixing was more than I realized. Currently the bathroom in the house has been gutted for over a month when I realized the floor was about to fall in from water damage. This causes a lot of problems when my female staff comes to work. I finally had to give up the ghost on one barn. The previous residents were major pack rats so it had years of stuff inside. I had to haul off all of it then tore it down using my tractor. The old pond had a dam and drain pipe but was so old that it had broken off below a good drainage level so I had to build it up by attaching a new pipe to the old one. Once I had that fixed I realized I had a resident beaver living on the far side of the pond but liked to plug up the drain pipe for fun. I have tried to "terminate" him but he is sly and only comes out when I'm not there so I have yet to get him. The well for the old house is very shallow and would only run 5 minutes of water before drying up and not running for another few hours. I had to build a pump from the pond for this reason. When I ordered the first greenhouse from Jaderloon I thought I'd try to save money by building it myself...big mistake! The instructions were like that on most technology these days....meant for engineers. It took 3 times longer for me to do this and I lost precious growing time....lesson learned....next time get it installed! I'm sure others can relate who had to start a small business from the bottom - everything cost twice as much as you thought and takes three times longer to accomplish than your business plan has.