4798 Gray Rd Cincinnati OH 45232 Phone 513-541-8170

Specialty herb and vegetable plant supplier for the spring planting season with over 1000 varieties of vegetable plants as well as broad variety of culinary and medicinal herb selections.

"Teach a person to fish and they're fed for life, teach them to garden and they can feed the whole neighborhood, and the more of us that can that the better it is for all of us." Al Funke 2009

Open Mid March to Mid November 

Open for spring 2021
Current hours are 9 am to 1 pm seven days a week

If you do Facebook we have an active and interesting page with great gardening posts and occasional friends and followers of Funke's freebies and specials. :)
We are a seasonal business and selection is at peak during the prime planting season of early May.

Funke's facebook page

Our Spring 2021 selection of Vegetable and Herb plants is as totally INSANE as ever!

Want to see why avid gourmet gardeners have been driving as far as 300 miles to shop our spring selection?
Come check us out for the spring 2021 planting season which is sure to be our most amazing yet.
Doing our best to upstage the previous year's selection continues to snowball.

Pretty much wherever your tribe came from on the planet we have ethnic vegetable and herb plants from your ancestral homeland.
Truly a treasure trove for the foodie, the ethnic, the scientific, and of course, the urban and suburban gardener looking for great fresh gourmet veggies right from the backyard, deck, or patio for the summer grilling and cookout season.

This year there are 270 + pepper varieties from Super hot to super sweet, and everything in between, including many exotic species from around the globe.
Our tomato selection tops 250 varieties focusing heavily on sustainable heirloom varieties that can be regrown from saved seed.
If you're looking for super disease and blight resistant F! hybrids we have those also.
All non-GMO and grown free of hard chemicals.
Although we are not "certified" organic, we practice organic techniques, and pride ourselves on the fact that our plants are safe to eat the day you take them home.
My apologies for not getting the tomato and pepper lists updated this year it's been hectic breaking in a new crew, our best ever BTW, my brain has been way overtaxed in the actual growing operations
to keep up with the cyber realm, it is like translating ancient Greek into modern English to get our grower program into a consumer usable list.
Rest assured this year's selection is as impressive as last's!
Al Funke

If you're a chili lover you'll LOVE shopping our insane selection! Here's the link for the 2020 Pepper list

If you're a "fire eater" you'll be pleased to know that we have about 30 million+ scoville varieties to choose from!

We start the seeds in January so you can buy plants at Funke's that will have pods ready by mid to late July in your home garden.

And of course, no sauce, salsa, salad, or big fat burger would be complete without tasty tomatoes.

With 250+ varieties to choose from this year you'll find an amazing selection of heirlooms, sauce varieties, salad cherries, burger slicers, and more than plenty to please the most serious foodie!

Here's the link to the 2020 tomato list

And it's not just peppers and tomatoes, our ethnic diversity selection spreads out across the cucumbers, squash, okra, melons, greens, sweet potatoes, salad greens, etc.

We believe in staying close to nature and grow our plants here as naturally as possible. Our catch phase is "Just say no, to GMO."

And Yes, we really do grow all of our vegetable and herb plants here on site, no middle men, no poisons, no kidding.

Here again, we take pride in the fact that our plants are safe to eat the day you take them home.

Our service, selection, and prices will delight both the beginner and expert gardener alike. In most cases our plants are less expensive than the chain stores and way safer to handle being free of the hazmat growth regulators commonly used on chain store crops.

Have a favorite variety that you'd like us to carry? Just drop an email to al (at) funkes.com or message our facebook page.  We like requests and feed back from our customers. :)

Just a note to any who may wonder. I have intentionally left the site in the "homepagey" feel of the internet of the mid 90's.
A simpler time before hacking, tracking, profiling, spying and obsessive commercialism took over. In a nutshell, heirloom plants, heirloom website. :) Al

Herbs! We grow about 150 varieties of culinary, medicinal, and spiritual use herbs.
Come see why professional Chefs, Herbalists, home gardeners, and market gardeners alike count on Funke's as their source for their herb garden starter plants.

We really do take our devotion to preserving our heritage and the diversity of species quite seriously, if you really enjoy reconnecting with nature through gardening, and of course fresh gorumet groceries right from your own garden, we think you'll find Funke's a refreshing change from the "same, same, stuff, stuff" garden stores out there. :)

 

Here's a bunch of other fun garden stuff to poke through on our site.

Home About us Products Services Video Easy gardening Fun Stuff

Sign up for Funke's email Liberty for dummies

The Liberty for dummies page is a simple refresher for all of us Americans that have forgotten what "liberty" is really all about.

It's cute, has great music, and even a kid can understand it. Some adults may be another story. :) It's well worth the watch. I hope you find it as refreshing/entertaining/enlightening as I. It was on the verge of extinction from the internet so I moved it here so that concept of "by the people, of the people, and for the people should not perish from the internet". My highest compliments to the artist that constructed it. Webmaster

The site is evolving. Rather than take it down for "maintainance" the way many do I decided to leave the old links from ten years ago below in place for posterity if nothing else. Eventually I'll move them into the history section where they belong.

Like life itself it's a work in progress. Al

 


  • Building a pond - A pictorial essay of the construction of the water feature in our front display. A good "how to" demonstration for those who'd like to get their feet wet :)
  • Poinsettias - We did at one time grow some of this finest poinsettias in the region. Consumer apathy and reluctance to pay for quality, and rising fuel costs forced us to stop growing them.
  • Virtual visit - This section needs to be moved to the history area of the site. I'll build a virtual vist page for the new Funke's when I get the chance. :) Al
  • Directions & Store hours - Simply put, How you get here from there :)
  • Links - gardening related links with site reviews
  • What's new? - New features and updates here on the site
  • Backissues - backissues of our popular gardening newsletter
  • Herbs! - Herbal information covering a broad range of topics realting to herbs Updated - 03/11/08
  • Testimonials - What Cincinnati's gardeners are saying about our shop and gardening newsletter :)

    • Help the little guys save the fees! Use cash!

    Want to do something to help the little guys keep their prices down for you the customer? STOP USING THE PLASTIC & START USING CASH. Credit cards do nothing but suck BILLIONS of $ away from the working class & small businesses every year. Who pays for the skymiles and rewards? Your merchant, that's who. Those rewards are taken electronically out of the merchant's portion of the sale when the card is scanned. Also cash can't be hacked by skimmers and data mining apps. It's far more likely these days to be robbed blind electronically than it is to ever be held up for your cash. Yes my friend, cash is actually safer to carry than plastic.

    God grant us the sereneity to accept the things we cannot change, but more importantly the COURAGE to change the things we can, and the WISDOM to know the difference.

    Serving the greater Cincinnati Garden Market for four generations since 1896

    We were at one time, perhaps the single most comprehensive selection of perennials, annuals, trees, shrubs and garden accessories in the region including tuned windchimes, garden furniture, tools, fertilzers and water gardening supplies. The unwillingness of garden consumers to buy plants in any significant numbers in anything less than perfect weather, and then only willing to pay what they did ten years ago while costs of operation skyrockted forced us to shift focus towards the self sufficient organic method food production of our past.

    Our primary mission is now to provide the plants, materials, and knowledge necessary for our customers to take control of their own food supply and eat like royalty in the process.

    "Teach a person to fish and they're fed for life, teach them to garden and they can feed the whole neighborhood!" Al Funke 2009

    We look forward to a sustainable future of healthy and bountiful harvests.

     

    Located at 4798 Gray Rd. Cincinnati Ohio 45232

    Phone 513-541-8170

    Browse through our extensive site through any of the above areas. We hope you have as much fun here as we have putting it here for you!

    We pride ourselves on customer service and do our level best to be as "user friendly" as possible!