Can You Make a Living as a Gardener?

Are You Ready to Quit Your Day Job and Become a Gardener?

When I was just getting started with my first kitchen garden business, Rooted Garden, I noticed an issue as I was scrolling through a list of professions for state insurance. And again when I was tagging my business page on Facebook.

Gardening was never an option. I could label myself a musician, a chef, or any of a hundred other options. But not a gardener. This told me one thing: Gardening wasn’t seen as a viable profession. 

And yet, everywhere you look, there are people working in the gardening industry—there are garden center employees, landscape designers, horticulturists, and even house plant influencers on social media. Many of these people are not just working within the garden industry, they're earning a living.

I wanted to earn my living working with plants, too. My family's garden had brought me so much joy over the years, and every time I stepped outside to harvest or tend, my thoughts turned to how I could somehow turn this hobby into income. So when I decided to return to working outside of the home after having my four kids, I spent hours googling all the different ways to earn money as a gardener. I read article after article about how to grow a ton of garlic in your backyard to sell. I watched hours of YouTube videos about saving seeds of rare plants that would fetch a higher price. I researched every possibility.

Let's look at some of the ideas I came across.

Ways to Make Money from Your Garden

Quick head's up: Before you sell any plants, check with your state to make sure you don't need a license first.

• Start extra seedlings from seed and sell them. Many gardeners would rather buy a locally and organically grown tomato seedling from a fellow gardener than one that's been sprayed with all sorts of stuff from the big box store.
• Put together herb garden or salad garden planters and sell them. These little containers make the perfect entrée to gardening for beginners.
• Save seeds from your garden and sell them in batches of 10 to 20, create themed seed packs for seeds that do well in your area at the same time, or make seed bombs for native flowers.
• Sell fresh or dried herbs from your garden. You could even make your own tea leaf blends, tinctures, oils, salves, or sachets to keep drawers smelling fresh.
• Sell produce from your garden. My initial intention with Rooted Garden Goods (which became Rooted Garden) was to sell gourmet salad leaves harvested from my raised beds.
• Grow and sell cut flowers.
• Make homemade jams and jellies from your perennial fruiting plants to sell at fairs and farmers' markets.

These ideas are best for earning a little side income. You probably won't be able to earn a living doing any one of these unless you find a way to sell a lot of your product, whatever it is.

My Gardening Business Idea

The idea I settled on at first was to sell the overabundance of leafy greens I was growing in my backyard. I figured my neighbors would feel good about buying locally-grown gourmet salads instead of those little plastic boxes from the store, so I went to the county clerk and registered Rooted Garden Goods.

It didn't take me long to realize that, one, my days would mostly consist of washing, drying, and packaging leaves, not spending hours blissfully zened out in the garden like I had imagined; and two, a couple hungry caterpillars were all it would take to suffer some pretty severe product loss in an organic salad garden. I might be perfectly fine eating leaves that have a couple holes in them, but I certainly couldn't sell them that way.

It was actually my friend who gave me the idea to teach others how to garden the way I do instead of trying to peddle things from my own backyard. She didn't want to buy spinach from me, she said. She wanted to learn how to grow her own spinach. Thanks to her, I realized that my job could entail bringing the joy of gardening to clients, that I could actually start a business teaching others how to do something I loved doing.

Another major bonus was that my business would no longer be dependent on weather. Teaching others doesn't require the right temperature to grow garlic or flowers or lettuce. I could work in the middle of winter or the dog days of summer.

So, I went back to the county clerk and registered a new business: Rooted Garden. I started calling myself a garden coach—someone who helps adults learn to master a new skill—even though there wasn't a scroll-down option for this job title anywhere I looked.

I would eventually expand my role and work as a garden consultant, a garden creator, a garden contractor, and a garden constructor. Let's briefly look at these different levels, each of which allows you to not just make some money working as a gardener, but actually earn a living, if that's your intention.

How to Earn a Living as a Gardener

These are the five different models you can follow to turn your garden experience and knowledge into a profitable profession. As you can see, they're really five different levels that build upon each other, and being a garden coach, the way I was when I first started teaching others how to garden, is at the heart of all five.

Garden Coach

A garden coach is someone who has enough experience in one area to be able to convey relevant information in a systemized way to a student. Here's the really cool part: There's almost no setup required because the main thing you're selling is your knowledge. 

You might be thinking that there are already way too many expert gardeners out there already. I mean, all you have to do is google "how to grow carrots", and 41 million results pop up! Fortunately, there's another really cool aspect of the gardening industry, and that's how dependent it is on location. How many of those results give you specifics on growing carrots in your exact climate? As a garden coach, you are the expert on gardening in your area, and that kind of knowledge is invaluable. You have a special ability to garden coach right where you live, with the people who live in your same town or city.

When I first started working as a garden coach, I hosted a salad garden workshop at my house. The package included getting to harvest your own salad from my garden and then learning my system for salad gardening. Did I make a ton of money in that first workshop? No, I did not. But it gave me confidence, and I continued to expand my reach. I also learned that putting people first was the key to making money as a gardener. I focused on helping my students transform instead of just learn one thing, and that was really powerful.

Garden Consultant

Garden consultants go a little further than garden coaches by recommending products that they sell to their students. This is not just selling garden products. There are already way too many garden products out there. This is matching clients with the right products and services and teaching them to use these things in their own space so that they can actually find success.

After I gave salad garden workshops for a while, I started pointing clients to products to use in their own salad gardens and selling them raised beds or seeds, making a small profit on each product. This is a simple way to begin making a profit as a gardener without needing to have a storefront and inventory, plus the overhead that comes with them. You base your purchases and the products that you're selling on the one-on-one or group coaching sessions you're doing.

As a consultant, you can offer your clients a much better experience by recommending products that you know are going to work based on the system you've developed. You're their support structure as they set up their gardens, which allows them to have confidence instead of feeling overwhelmed.

Garden Creator

Garden creators go a little further than consultants and create planting plans and garden designs for their clients.

Make sure you know the legalities in your area. Some states have requirements in terms of who can design landscape and garden spaces, though there are usually fewer legal restrictions on kitchen gardens than other spaces.

Garden Contractor

Contracts actually help clients set up their own productive and beautiful kitchen gardens. Essentially, you'd do all the heavy lifting when it comes to installing the garden.

When I was building Rooted Garden, I did a lot of the labor myself until I ended up with too many projects beyond the scope of what I could handle. So I started contracting. I found professionals with the specialties I needed (for example, a carpenter to build the raised bed), and I contracted them to do the job. I became more of a manager in those situations. I was guaranteeing my clients that they'd not only get to use my system and find success with the products I sold them, but they'd also have high-quality structures created for them.

One of your major roles as a contractor would be vetting each service provider so that your client knows they’re getting skilled, reliable people working on their project. You’re not just curating products for your clients now; you’re curating the best in the business in your town. 

At Rooted Garden, we’re always on the lookout for heroes in our town—who’s making compost, who’s growing great starter plants, who’s producing awesome seeds, who’s welding beautiful trellises. 

I was initially hesitant about getting paid for my contracting services. That is, until I realized something so simple: If I got paid for this, then I could pay other people, too. There are people in Houston who are supporting their families and putting food on the table because Rooted Garden pays them. There could be someone making nutrient-dense compost in your area right now, or someone cultivating heirloom varieties right now, but no one knows to buy from them, and as a result, their products are going to waste because they haven’t been scoped out by a knowledgeable garden coach/contractor yet. You could be that person. 

We’re talking about job creation, not just for yourself, but for everyone who is doing good work in your city—other changemakers. I get to support farmers, nonprofits, compost makers, local artisans, and more.

Again, there may be legal ramifications for contractors, depending on where you live and work. Make sure you do your research.

Garden Constructor

If you're handy, you can do all the work yourself as a garden constructor. When I first got started, I did all the building but quickly learned that it was not the best use of my time and that there were others who could do these types of jobs much better than I could.

Learn more about each of these levels here.

How Much Money Can a Garden Consultant Make?

The answer to this question really depends on how many hours you have each week to devote to growing your own garden consulting business. We have students who've gone through Garden Coach Society who have full-time day jobs and only work on their own business on the side, often during weekends. We have others who work part-time while they're busing raising young children or caring for aging parents. Others still treat their businesses as their full-time job and work actively to grow their client base daily.

You can see for yourself how different garden consultants handle their businesses here.

Of course, those garden consultants who are able to devote their full time to launching and scaling their businesses tend to be the students who go on to build businesses that gross six and even seven figures. I'd like to share with you the story of one Garden Coach Society member who joined in June of 2020. She started her own New Jersey-based business focused on organic gardening in January of 2021, and by her first summer in business, I would have easily believed she’d been in operation for four years instead of four months. She earned her first $100,000 in less than a year. This, from a self-taught gardener who originally believed no one would be interested in paying her to help them garden.

Learn How to Grow Your Own Gardening Business

In my first year of being a garden business owner, I frequently posted about the progress we were making on Instagram. I began receiving tons of messages from gardeners saying, "You have my dream job. How did you get started? I wish you could help me do that where I live!”

I realized that I didn't just want to teach new gardeners in my area how to set up and grow their own gardens. I wanted to connect new gardeners everywhere to experienced local gardeners who could help them. To accomplish that, there would have to be experienced gardeners with businesses like mine across the country.

So I launched the Gardenary Consultant Certification (GCC) program in late 2017, and over the last five years, I've trained hundreds of gardeners to start their own garden coach business like Rooted Garden across the country. My dream is to help at least 1,000 more people start and grow their own profitable garden coach business over the next three years.

If enough of us are working as garden coaches, I believe we can make gardening an esteemed position. We can be leaders in an industry long overdue for a little disruption. When we’re all growing our businesses together, we'll create even more job opportunities within the garden profession and make it to where “garden coach" is an option on drop-down menus.

As a garden coach, you could:

• create a meaningful coaching business that will help you and your family financially
• help your community by creating new gardens all over your town or city
• do good for the entire planet by helping the environment
• share your passion with others
• build a community of like-minded people around you

There are so many opportunities out there now for people who have gardening knowledge beyond just selling some plants from your space or saving seeds. I would be honored to teach you my different models for earning a living as a gardener. I hope you’ll learn more about how you can grow your self and your business inside GCC.

Garden Coaches Featured in This Blog

Throughout this post, we've added pictures of some of our actual garden coaches who are supporting themselves and making a difference in their communities. They include:

• Raven Jennings of Soil and Supper in Lynchburg, Virginia
• Jessica Guillory of Sprouted Kitchen Gardens in Fayetteville, Arkansas
• Silvia Gramuglia of Bay Area Garden Design in Campbell, California
• Katrina Karczewski of Grateful Garden in Denver, Colorado
• Michelle Baldwin of From the Ground Up Gardens in Chesterfield, Virginia
• Yolanda Jones of Plant and Savor in Pasadena, California
• Hilary Madsen of Texas Raised Gardens in Kyle, Texas