Did You Know You Could Make a Living from Your Garden Without Selling Your Harvests?

It's true. I'll tell you about just a few things you can do from your garden in order to make a living.

Eight years ago, I was looking for a way to make a living from my garden because I love love love gardening... and I also needed some money. I'd been homeschooling my four kids but decided not to anymore. We wanted to send my two oldest to private school for a year, so I felt like I was on the hook for their $18,000 tuition. I needed a way to make $18k and to make it fast.

But I still wanted to be available to my kids. I wanted to drive them to and from school each day. My youngest was in preschool, so I also had a limited timeframe from about 8 am to 12 pm that I could work.

I was pretty much asking for the impossible: something that would earn money, something meaningful to me, and something I could do part time on the weekdays.

As you can imagine, my job search was turning up pretty empty. I applied to some positions, did some interviews, but nothing was working out. So I told myself, "You know what? If this is gonna happen, I'm going to have to make it happen myself."

That's when I started looking for entrepreneurial opportunities. I considered different types of businesses I could create, products I could sell, services I could offer—anything to make money within a timeframe that worked for me. Whenever I considered my different skillsets, I couldn't help but come back to the garden.

Gardening was my getaway. Gardening had helped me survive homeschooling and being home with my four kids during those years when my career was paused.

I just loved it. And more than that, I believed in it. I still do. The world would be a much better place if we all had gardens.

So I had this thing that I loved to do, that I was good at (well, good enough at it), and that had a mission and benefits I could stand behind. I started searching for ways I could turn the garden into a business.

How to Make Money Gardening, According to Google

It was around this point that I started googling things like "how do I make a living as a gardener?" Well, the interwebs gave me all kinds of ideas. 

One idea was to plant up my entire yard with garlic. Garlic sells for a pretty good price per pound, and it's not that hard to tend. You just put it in the ground and let it do its thing. Six to nine months later, you pull it up, and boom! You can make some money. The article I found actually promised you could make like $40K selling garlic (I mean, that would definitely pay for private school), but I thought of a couple issues. One, my yard wasn't that big. It would look pretty funny completely covered in garlic. And two, I didn't even know if my HOA would allow that.

So intriguing idea, but not for me.

Another option was to take cuttings from perennial plants and root them. You basically turn your backyard into a nursery and grow those new plants into ones large enough to sell. "Okay," I thought, "Maybe I could do this." But then I realized how much responsibility this would add. I was already a busy mom who could barely keep up with the laundry. Starting my own nursery would be like going from having four babies to 400 babies. Probably not the best idea. I like propagating plants, but it's not the thing that's going to become my career.

I looked into a couple of other options, including turning my backyard into a food forrest so that I could sell the extra produce for a good price. That involved me waiting years to get the fruits of my labor and then spending my weekends at farmers' markets, trying to get people to buy the food that I'd grown. As someone who frequents farmers' markets, I can tell you there are, unfortunately, too many farmers who leave the market each week with trucks still full of delicious food that no one bought.

All that to say, Google disappointed. It didn't come up with the solution that I needed.

My First Idea to Make Money Gardening

After a while, I thought, "Hey, you know one thing I already grow a lot of that's pretty easy to take care of is lettuce. What if I just sell lettuce?" Lettuce sells at a high price for a low volume, and I knew from experience that I could produce a ton of leaves from a very small space.

I told my husband my idea, and wise as he is, he said, "Great, let's test it out. Why don't you harvest and sort 10 packages, and I'll bring them to work and sell them for you?" So that night, I harvested tons of lettuce, washed it, and bagged it. It only took 10 bags for me to talk myself out of my idea. I couldn't see myself doing that at scale in my kitchen, and I wasn't sure that washing lettuce was really the best use of my time and abilities. 

My Second Idea to Make Money Gardening

Disappointed, I talked with my friend Teresa. She had been running a business while she homeschooled her kids, so naturally, she was my girl to call for advice. I told her, "Look, I gotta have a way to pay for my kids to go to private school for a year. I'd like to start my own business, and I'd like it to be related to the garden." I told her about all the different ideas I'd come across. 

She interrupted me: "Nicole, it's not the lettuce I want from you. Or the garlic. I want to know how you garden. I want you to teach me how to do what you do. I'm thinking something like garden consulting." 

This was a lightbulb moment for me. Instead of me selling stuff from my garden, I could sell my knowledge of the garden. I could sell my information and advice. That felt so much more inspiring. I could enable people to do what I have done, not just give them what I'd produced.

This conversation set me on the path of becoming a garden consultant and changed my life forever. To this day, I've never had to sell one single harvest. Over an eight-year period, my garden consulting company has grossed more than $4 million, and it's all from garden consulting, plus services and products that are sold as part of the garden consulting system. 

Let's look at a few things you could sell that don't have anything to do with your harvests. We're not talking about filling up your yard with garlic or growing a bunch of fruit trees or even a big ol' bed of lettuce. We're talking about growing a garden business by garden consulting.

Step One: Document Your Garden

You might be asking, "Wait, taking pictures and videos of my garden is going to help me make a living?"

It's the start. The first step of becoming a great consultant is studying yourself and observing the lessons from your own garden so you can take those and deliver them in a systemized way to your clients and students.

Believe it or not, you could even sell this documentation eventually. There's value in being able to show what your garden looks like in your city from month to month. Selling the documentation inspires other people to have the same kind of success inside their own garden, as well.

Step Two: Teach Workshops

Workshops are paid-for times during which you bring together groups of people who want to learn a specific skill from you, and they're going to walk away with something in hand that shows them how to take that first step.

You could teach a workshop all about growing tomatoes, and your attendees could leave with their own potted tomato plant. You could teach a workshop about growing salad (Hey, sounds like a good idea!), and your attendees could walk away with a container planted with salad garden seeds. Your workshop can be about whatever. You'll take the lessons you learned from your documentation and turn it into a three- to five-step workshop to teach what you've learned from your own garden experience. Your attendees should walk away with a very small example of what they can do on a bigger scale in their own space.

Workshop tickets can sell for $30, $50, even $150. I've been to some workshops that cost $200—that price guaranteed time with the instructor and a certain type of sample of their teachings.

There are many opportunities to make a living just from doing gardening workshops. Here's a picture of an herb garden workshop I did years ago.

Step Three: Offer Consultations

This step is so simple yet powerful, and that's doing garden consultations. A consultation simply involves you meeting with your client and letting them tell you all their desires about their own garden. You observe their space, and then you tell them about your system. Your system includes all the things you've documented from your own garden that work. You'll teach the client that system so they can use it in their own garden, and you'll give them recommendations.

If you want to take it even further, you could give them a proposed design and plan that they could implement in their own garden space.

Garden consultations should start around $100, and then they can go up from there, depending on your skill level and what you're offering them after the consultation (i.e., a garden design or planting plan).

Step Four: Sell Products That Go Along with Your Consultation

Once you're doing consultations, you can begin to sell products and services that go along with your recommendations.

This step naturally flows from doing consultations. When I first started out, I would be telling my clients things like: "Use these raised beds" or "Get this type of trellis" or "Grow this type of plant right now." They would look at me and say, "Well, could you source those raised beds for me? Could you bring me those types of plants?" I was like, "I guess I can!"

It can be a lot of work to go out and find something and make sure it's the right thing to buy. Clients are happy to have you find products for them right after their consultation. You can charge what the item costs to you plus a markup. Once you get your business set up and running, you'll be able to purchase things at a wholesale price, and then you can charge the retail price straight to your client.

In this case, you're not just making money on the consultation; you're also making a little bit of markup on all the products that you've provided for them. At the same time, you're giving the client peace of mind that they've bought the exact right thing, which feels so very good.

Step Five: Create a Garden Membership

The last step is to create a membership. This is a way for you to teach a group of people over a longer period of time. It's similar to a workshop but more powerful because you'll meet with your students over the course of an entire gardening season or even a year.

One of the wonderful things about growing a garden is that it's very community oriented. The garden invites us to do the work as a community. And when you create a garden membership, you're creating that community for all the people who want to learn how to garden in your town or city. You allow them not just to learn from you but also from one another.

You can conduct this membership online or in person. You could meet together once a week, once a month, or once a quarter to go over the new lessons you've documented from your own garden and the projects that you'll all be taking on in the month ahead.

Creating a membership is a powerful way to help people continue gardening. You've set them up with a garden through a workshop or a consultation, you've sold them some products and services, and now you're giving them a way to stay in touch with you—to continue receiving encouragement and advice on what to do for each and every month in the garden.

Time to Take the First Step Toward Making the Garden Your Career

So there you have it—those are the things that you can do to make a living as a garden consultant, and you never ever have to sell one of your harvests. I'm not just pulling these things out of my hat. These are all services and products that I've personally charged for over the years and that I've helped over 1,000 gardeners charge for as Gardenary consultants. These steps have worked to build garden consulting business around the world.

If you like what you've read here today, check out our certification program. See if it's a good fit for you.

Whatever you do, don't hold back. If you know how to garden, if you believe in the garden the way that I did eight years ago, then you should start charging for your gardening advice and learning how to make a living doing this thing that you love. Each and every time someone pays you to be their garden consultant, they'll pay so much more attention to their garden. This is a way for them to signify to themselves that they're taking their garden seriously and they're ready to learn to garden just the way that you do.