For those who don’t know back in the 16 hundreds people where spending a bunch and I mean a bunch on tulips. Thing is the price went up so much that no one was willing to buy tulips anymore and the price dropped to almost nothing. I see the same thing happening now where the nurseries are upping their price and yet they still sell out. A good example is Raintree Nursery just upped their cherry prices from 30 something dollars to pretty much 50 dollars. That is almost a 20 dollar increase in a year. I wonder how far the market will go before the market just says enough.
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Id be interested to know if it is the average person buying out all of the stock, or if private corporations have a significant part to play, as we currently see in the real estate market, etc.
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the tulip bubble was very large in the Netherlands. I don’t see that happening with tulips again. But the other day there was a topic started about house plants similar to this.
i don’t think most fruit tree’s will go to to extreme hights. Propagating rootstocks is usually the limiting factor. Unlike tulips which only dubbel or triple each year. you can graft a 1000 tree’s of the buds of 1 semi large tree.
if prices get to extreme i think a lot of member here might make a stool bed and sell some tree’s.
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I have grown my Montmorency and north star from seed and the cherries taste great.
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Could you imagine some trillion dollar corp buying up all the nurseries and jacking the prices to the moon.
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I was researching house plants and came across Monstera obliqua (Google it). There are even cases of forgery, with people trying to pass the much more common M. addissonii as obliqua. And that’s something you can’t even eat…
As far as the fruit tree prices go - could be something to do with the increased demand due to covid?
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The tulip bubble also included a bubble in tulip futures and derivatives, and people with no desire to sell or grow tulips bought tulip futures for the upcoming crop as an investment. The bubble crashed before the harvest and some people “owned” whole truckloads (cart loads?) of worthless flowers.
If nurseries start letting you reserve large orders in advance and then resell those reservations at higher prices, then watch out! 
I recommend a great book on bubbles that goes in depth on the tulip thing and other examples, Devil Take The Hindmost:
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most prices increases you are seeing are a result of increased demand and decreased supply while tulip mania was a result of massive futures speculation. apples vs oranges.
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I don’t see this as a bubble. It’s simple supply and demand. Demand is driving prices. Once demand settles down prices will react accordingly. Even if demand rises that will drive start up nurseries to meet demand. Which will ease prices too. I doubt they will go back down but the inflation of prices should lesson with time.
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I’m waiting for that to happen with lumber prices.
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Lumber’s already come down a bit, not sure if it’s reflected in retail prices just yet, though.
Regarding the larger topic, the closest thing to the tulip bubble in plants that I’m aware of is trading and selling of rare (sometimes not actually rare) figs. However, that’s small potatoes compared to the tulip bubble, and we don’t really see people trading fig cutting futures or futures on ungerminated seeds.
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News today is that the lumber stock shortage is over. But prices will take a month to stabilize.
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For edibles/fruits, yes. But those prices are NOTHING compared to some of the houseplant prices out there right now. Some carnivorous plants go for insane prices, too.
https://www.blackjungleterrariumsupply.com/Philodendron-joepii-plant-D_p_3554.html
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Very true! Forgot about that area.
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So you’re saying it might be time to get in the monstera futures business?
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I’m waiting patiently. I need to finish a project and really didn’t want to pay $13 for 2x4s… My brother needs a bunch of 2x8s that he’s been waiting on to redo a bunch of docking. I doubt plywood will come down any time soon.
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I hope so! They are my favorites especially broken tulips. And Holland is close by!
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More likely the US dollar is going the way of the mark in the WEIMAR REPUBLIC.
Just hasn’t started to snowball yet. Stimulus checks may have been the proverbial straW.
Producer prices up in May by 7%…the most ever in one month in US history.
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As far as plant prices go, Hoyas and Aroids are getting crazy expensive. But I think it’s just because they’re the houseplant of the moment. People have rediscovered them, just like they rediscovered gardening due to the pandemic and bought out all the seeds.
As far as the tulip thing, as stated by other posters, that bubble was due to speculation, not just supply vs. demand. There’s a really good novel about it called Tulip Fever that was made into a movie of the same name (also pretty good) a few years ago.
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Folks over on one of the wildlife habitat boards were talking about some outfit offering an ‘instant orchard’ of 10 apples & crabs recommended by ‘Dr. Deer’ for $1050.00…not even rare or hard to obtain varieties. Don’t know if that included shipping.
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