A unique Castroville nursery is trying to stay in business by buying the property it leases.

Tucked away on a property just off Highway 1 and northwest of Castroville, Navarro’s Mixed Nursery is a singular place. Over nearly an acre, exotic cacti and succulent species are interspersed with pots of vegetables that owner Manuel Navarro puts on his kitchen table.

It’s like a botanical garden, except that most everything is for sale, and Navarro has a lot of selling to do: He has just the rest of this year to sell enough inventory, he says, to come up with about $400,000-$500,000 to secure a loan to buy the property.

His landlord is selling the property, which includes a house, and Navarro has come to a tough realization: It would cost him just as much to move the business somewhere else as to buy it, so he’s trying to stay where he’s at.

That means moving product out the door – or gate, in this case – and several pots on his property are nursing young succulents and cacti to keep the inventory intact.

Normally, he says, the bulk of his business (65-70 percent) comes from contractors doing big projects in places on the Monterey Peninsula or in Carmel Valley, but he says a downturn in construction over the past few years has hampered revenue.

“Contractors used to come every day, about three to five, and now it’s two to five a week,” he says. “I am not making money the way I used to anymore.”

But Navarro is hopeful. “We’re going to try to throw every punch we can to see if we can stay here,” he says. Sales were down in the dreary winter, but he says he sold roughly $70,000 worth of inventory in April, clearing about $40,000 in profit. In 2021-22, he says, he was selling between $100,000-$200,000 a month.

Part of what Navarro is trying to sell is not just beautiful cacti and succulents, but a new way to think about landscaping in an increasingly water-starved Central Coast. “I’ve been promoting these plants for the last 15 years,” he says.

In order to move inventory, Navarro says he’s selling at wholesale prices, and in his estimation, he has about $4 million worth of plants and pots. It’s a business he built from scratch after the Great Recession, when his construction company – Bullet Homebuyers, which bought, fixed up and flipped homes – went belly-up, and he was left with only about $6,000, he says. He used that to start the nursery.

Should he succeed, Navarro has big plans for the future, and wants to build out the property. (He’s staunchly against paying taxes, he says, so he uses every opportunity he can to reinvest in his business to offset them.)

Navarro, like some of his plants, is a unique specimen. At 73, he looks younger than his years, which he attributes to his raw food diet of plants, with nuts and seeds as his primary protein. “I’m a spiritual healer, I only pull information out of the cosmos,” he says.

His outside-of-the-box spirit is precisely what makes his nursery a singular place, and why he’s banking on its future success. “People all over the United States know who we are,” he says.