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Mary and Tom Wheeler, a husband-and-wife gardening team who live in Seattle, took a close look at the soil a little over three years ago, and they haven't been sorry since. They now realize a pretty fair cash return from their spare-time activity, which basically is putting dirt in attractive packages. These they sell to people who want just enough dirt to fill one flower pot. Of course, there's more to it than that, so here's the story from the beginning.

The Wheelers began digging for a method of merchandising dirt because of a timely tip. The tip came to them in the form of a complaint. It seems that Tom's sister, who lives in an apartment house, had acquired a flowering plant, but she lacked the earth necessary to keep it alive. All of the dirt in her neighborhood was either carefully hoarded in flower pots and boxes or covered with concrete and asphalt.

"Do you know," she said to Mary and Tom, while visiting them at their suburban "ranchette" near Seattle one Sunday in the fall of 1950, "that I have been to a dozen garden stores and haven't been able to beg, borrow or buy enough dirt to fill a six-inch pot?"

Her problem caused considerable merriment initially, but she was serious about wanting some earth. Tom went out in the backyard and spaded up some black loam for her to take back to the dirtless city.

After she had left, both Mary and Tom remarked on how odd it was that getting a potful of dirt could be such a problem. Dirt was one thing they had plenty of—ten acres of it, in fact.

THAT EVENING, Mary recalls, both she and Tom came up with their big idea at almost the same instant: "Why not sell dirt in packages to apartment house gardeners?"

The more they discussed the idea the better it seemed. The next day Tom took time off from his regular occupation, which is buying and selling boats of every description, to make some calls at a number of variety stores around Seattle. The clerks at the garden counters told him that they received from two to a dozen inquiries every week from people who wanted to buy dirt.

Tom also called on the manager of a chain of variety stores in the Puget Sound area, told him what the clerks had said and then outlined his plan for packaging dirt and selling it over the counter. The manager liked the idea, but he also offered some advice.

"We'll order," he told Tom, "but only when we see the product packaged and ready to go." He went on to explain that a lot of people came to him with good ideas, but that they always seemed to want someone else to do the development work while they collected the profit.

"We buy products—not ideas," he concluded.

Tom went home that evening convinced that he had a market waiting, if only he and Mary could develop an efficient means of producing a uniform product.

THE FIRST consideration in selling dirt, naturally enough, was figuring out a source of supply for the raw material. Mary made the decision in this case, and it was a decision which saved them a lot of grief and extra labor in the long run.

Mary decided that they shouldn't dig up their own land and sell it by the bag. Such an operation would require mechanical equipment of some kind, and they weren't prepared to make a large investment in machinery. Besides, soil is a precious thing to a gardener, and Mary couldn't bear to sell the earth she had mulched, fertilized and spaded through the seasons.

Tom inquired around among the local nurserymen and found that it was possible to buy dirt. He contacted one of these commercial dirt suppliers, who sell their wares mostly to landscape gardeners, and bought one cubic yard of black dirt. The dirt was dumped on the floor of their garage, which was the only working space they had available, and the Wheelers were in business, or at least started in business.

Mary had long held a theory on what made earth good for growing plants. She maintained that good earth should supply food, air and water to the plant's root system. So she set about improving the yard of dirt they had bought. First she added various common fertilizers to provide an abundance of the necessary growing foods. Then she added a mixture of compost and peat moss to keep the soil open and well ventilated. Sand was added to permit water to filter evenly and easily through the mixture. Once mixed, the whole batch was screened to remove the rocks and it was almost ready to sell.

WHAT THE new product lacked was a name, a package and a price.

Tom and Mary thought that the name would be the easiest of the three jobs facing them. Why not just call it "Good Earth," since that was what it was? To be on the safe side, Tom asked a lawyer friend if he should find out whether the name had been used before. The lawyer friend assured him that it would be wise to look into the matter. Tom told him to go ahead and the lawyer discovered the same name was used by a firm in Texas, that the name had been copyrighted for a whole line of garden supplies, and that another name would be necessary.

Tom hit on the name "Planter's Hunch," and it stood up. To keep it for their own, they invested some more of their hobby capital in having it copyrighted. The name has proved to be one of the Wheelers' biggest assets in their dirt merchandising venture. It is catchy, clever and easy to remember, so the product is easier to sell.

Another requirement of good merchandising is an attractive package. At that time, January, 1951, Polyethylene bags were just beginning to be used on a large scale. Since Polyethylene was a new and attractive material, Tom decided it would make a good package in which to introduce a new product to the public.

Before the bags could be ordered, however, the proper size had to be determined, and that took a little investigating. On the basis of a survey of florists and their own gardening friends, the Wheelers concluded that most house plants live in six-inch pots. A six-inch pot required about two and a half pounds of dirt, so bags large enough to hold that amount of dirt were ordered.

The bags, incidentally, were the most expensive part of the finished product. The Wheelers had hoped to set the over-the-counter price for packaged dirt at twenty-five cents per bag, but the cost of the bag forced them to up the price to twenty-nine cents at the retail level.

After the bags arrived, the problem of labels came up. At that time, no suitable method had been developed for printing directly on Polyethylene, so paper labels had to be printed and these were to be taped to the filled bags. Tape also was used to seal the first bags.

ONE BLUSTERY February day, Tom made up a set of sample bags, stowed them in his briefcase and set out to sell dirt. First he called on the manager of the variety store chain—the man who had said he would order when he saw the product.

The manager remembered Tom as "the fellow who wanted to sell dirt," and he was obviously surprised when Tom hoisted a package of dirt out of his briefcase. In fact, he was so amazed he ordered six dozen bags on the spot. The manager requested delivery as soon as possible. He was understandably curious to see how the product would sell in the dead of winter when few people were doing more than thinking about their next summer's garden.

Tom received several smaller orders that first day, including an order for several dozen bags from the biggest department store in Seattle—a firm which long has made a policy of encouraging local producers.

Tom was eager to make good on his promises for prompt delivery, so he and Mary sat up well into the night in the unheated garage, filling, sealing and labeling 200 bags of dirt.

The next morning Tom got up early to make his first delivery of Planter's Hunch before going to his office. After eating breakfast he went out into the garage and discovered to his dismay that the labels on all of the bags had come unstuck and every bag had come unsealed. The tape, he found out too late, would not hold in the cold.

Tom carried the whole batch of 200 bags into the kitchen and warmed them a dozen at a time in Mary's stove. By noon, the 200 bags were resealed and relabeled and ready to deliver.

PLANTER'S HUNCH made its debut on the counters of Seattle variety stores that same afternoon. Tom watched one display of his product for almost an hour before closing time, and nobody bought any. He says he felt like stopping passers-by and directing them to the garden counter to see the marvelous new product—dirt.

But the new product did sell as the days went by, and filling the orders that came in began to take more and more of the Wheelers' spare time. They weren't exactly coining money, but Mary located a near-by source of fertilizers and soil conditioners at lower prices, and that helped them a bit on their profit margin.

To cut down the time required to turn out a batch of packaged dirt, both Mary and Tom began scouting around for labor-saving devices. Tom devised a simple balance which made it possible to speed up the weighing of the dirt. An electrician friend made a heat press which sealed the tops of the Polyethylene bags. The same friend, who later became a part time employee, also built a rotary screen and mixing drum which made it possible to mix Planter's Hunch faster.

But the biggest time-saver was an improved printing process which enabled them to buy ready-printed Polyethylene bags. The Wheelers were among the first users of the printed bags in the Pacific Northwest.

THE WHEELERS' overall business was not large in 1951, but it grew steadily. Their largest customer ordered between twelve and sixteen dozen bags of dirt a month, and their total sales for the first year were about 15,000 bags. They sold mostly to chain variety stores, so their product was fairly well distributed over the Pacific Northwest. They even got one customer, whom they still have, in Anchorage, Alaska.

On the basis of their steady growth, the Wheelers took on a part time employee to help with the mixing and packaging. Tom also decided toward the end of that first year that it was time to expand the "line," so he brought out a five-pound bag, which sold for 49 cents, as compared to the twenty-nine-cent price tag on the two-and-a-half-pound bag.

The second year of the Wheelers' spare-time venture saw faster expansion, thanks to Tom's sales efforts. He traveled throughout the Pacific Northwest and introduced Planter's Hunch in stores in Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Northern California. All of these states have plenty of wide open spaces where one would think that everyone would be able to find enough dirt to fill a flower pot or two. But it was not the dirt alone that the indoor gardeners wanted. The fact that Planter's Hunch is enriched with fertilizers and spiked with soil conditioner apparently is the main selling feature of the product.

Sales topped 40,000 bags in 1952, but on the basis of experience it was decided that dirt merchandising would have to be conducted on a regional basis. Shipping costs limited the area where packaged dirt from Seattle could be sold profitably. Tom sadly concluded that New York, which he considers to be a "dirt salesman's dream," was too far away.

Since the Wheelers' business is regional, it also, for the time being at least, is small enough to handle on a spare-time basis. Tom still devotes most of his time to his boat brokerage business, and Mary devotes the major share of her time to her home and two children, Mary Gale, 5, and Tom, Junior,7.

In 1953, Tom and Mary grossed about $6,000 on their hobby, and out of that gross came the cost of the printed bags, taxes, wages for their part time employee, the cost of the dirt, fertilizer and soil conditioner, distribution costs and all the other incidental expenses involved in operating a business, however small.

Tom prefers to act as a one-man sales force for his product because he enjoys selling. As a result, he now is becoming known as "Wheeler, the Dirt Farmer," even though he was a boat broker for years before he started selling dirt.

Now, whenever he goes into a store in a strange town he usually introduces himself by saying, "I'm Tom Wheeler. I sell dirt."

"For some reason," Tom says, "that always gets a laugh."

MARY AND Tom still spend part of their spare time just gardening, but their gardening has a purpose now. Mary's latest interest is raising African violets and gloxinias, a violet-like flower which originated in the jungles of South America.

Raising violets and gloxinias has become something of a gardening fad all over the country, so Mary has been working on a special soil mixture suited to the particular requirements of both plants. The buffet in the dining room of the Wheelers' new home in the city is fitted out as an incubator for baby African violets. Each violet is planted in its own special "formula" of growing earth, and in time Mary expects to come up with the perfect soil mixture for violets and gloxinias.

Tom also has some products in mind for future development, including special fertilizers and soil builders.

The Wheelers, who have seen their hobby develop into a growing business in three years time, are just a little surprised at their own success.

"We worked hard," Mary says, "and we found that every problem could be solved if we just kept at it."

Tom's advice to would-be dirt sellers in other parts of the country is this: "The idea, the raw material and the package are major parts of the finished product. But to make it sell, you've got to get out and push it."

Tom says that people who never have tried selling their own products should not worry too much.