Taking the First Step Toward Becoming a Garden Consultant

It was November of 2015, and my cursor was hovering over the send button in Gmail. I had been coming back, day after day, trying to work up the courage to send this email, which would announce that I was starting my own gardening business.

"I love two things about Houston: the people and the gardens," I had written, "and it's for this reason that I'm starting my first company called Rooted Garden.”

I attached a photo of me in my garden I'd asked my cousin to take (see picture below).

I finally hit send.

Later, I found out I had included the wrong date in my email, but what matters is that I had taken the first step toward becoming a garden consultant and starting my own business.

Long Hours Away from My Family and Little Job Flexibility Were Not for Me

Let me back up just a bit.

Before I started Rooted Garden, I had been homeschooling my four kids. I had them home with me every day. All day.

Things were going great overall. My husband was busy at his job at MD Anderson, and I was doing some consulting work on the side, but there was a part of me that really missed working and being in business. When we looked over our finances each month, it was also pretty clear that our family would benefit from me bringing in a bit more money while our kids went to school outside of the house.

Cut to me applying to a ton of different jobs that fall. I tried to be a teacher, a substitute; I even applied to work in the development office of MD Anderson.

But with every job application, I realized that to bring more money home, I would need to be gone from home a lot. Away from my family. I probably wouldn't be home when my kids returned from school in the afternoons. I might not be there to help them with breakfast in the mornings. I might even miss some dinners and precious weekends.

More and more, I was realizing that if I wanted to work with flexible hours that would maximize my family time, I was just going to have to start my own business.

I Wanted to Find a Way to Make Money Gardening

My family had been gardening together for about five years, both in Nashville, Tennessee, and in our new home in Houston, Texas. The garden became a refuge for me when things were getting a little too much inside the house (especially when I had four kids under the age of five!). The garden was a place to get away and seek peace, find beauty in simple ways, and continue to learn, even as an adult. I could bring a little bit of magic that I had grown in the garden into the kitchen, which was otherwise a place of endless tasks and picky toddlers.

Our garden had brought me so much joy, and every time I was out there, I had this little thought: Is there any way I could take the joy I have in the garden and turn it into some type of business?

My first idea was actually to start Rooted Garden Goods. I would sell the overabundance of food I was growing in my backyard. I started telling anybody who would listen that we were going to be growing enough lettuce to sell salad harvests to the whole neighborhood. I went to the county clerk and registered Rooted Garden Goods.

It was when I was talking to one of my friends about business formation that she said something that changed everything. She told me, "Nicole, I don't actually want to buy your harvests from your garden. I could get that at the farmers’ market or through a CSA. What I really want is for you to teach me how you grow that salad in your garden.”

She continued: "Have you ever thought about not growing things to sell, but selling garden consulting? Selling the knowledge that you have and passing that on to people like me who really want to learn but feel overwhelmed and confused?”

This proved to be a pivotal phone conversation. Instead of doing all the labor myself and spending all my time washing and packaging produce, wouldn't it be so much more fun to share the skills and knowledge that I had with others? To gardening bring that spark of joy to clients?

I returned to the county clerk, bought back the registration of Rooted Garden Goods, and instead, registered simply Rooted Garden. I would be a garden consultant, not a peddler of goods from my garden.

I Turned $450 into a Successful Company

That brings us back to November, when I sent out that first email.

By Christmas, I had already brought my company to life. I had done ten or so consultations and had helped some of my friends install DIY garden boxes. I booked ten more consults for January of 2016. I created my system for going into a space, observing the sunlight, taking measurements, and creating a plan for the kitchen garden. Then, I would build the box, have the soil delivered, and bring the plants (sometimes from my own garden).

My business was mostly boxes, soil, plants, and seeds, plus a lot of instruction. (While I was doing more than okay for a new business owner, I would have killed for a supportive community of others starting businesses like mine at that time.)

The most amazing part was that I spent very little money to get my business going. I had registered my three-year-old daughter for this one particular preschool but then changed my mind and gone with a different school. They mailed me a reimbursement check for $450 right around the same time I was starting Rooted Garden.

I took the check to the bank and used it to create Rooted Garden. Believe it or not, after more than five years in business, that's still the only money from my personal account I've had to use to fund my growing company.

I'll tell you more about what Rooted Garden became and our team of talented garden consultants later.

Ready to See What You Can Create as a Garden Coach?

The purpose of this post was just to show you what you can create when you have a dream, a vision, an idea. For me, the right idea was to focus on giving others the ability to garden successfully. I'll tell you more about the art of becoming a garden consultant in Part Two.