What Happened to the Grow Your Self Podcast?

Welcome Back to the Grow Your Self Podcast

Oh my goodness, it is so good to say those words to you. It has been a hot minute. Actually, it's been a hot three years.

This morning as I was preparing to come into the studio to record these episodes, I was like, "Oh man, it's been a year or two since I've done a podcast episode." And then I did the math and realized: "No, Nicole, it has almost been three whole years." My goodness, how time flies!

I launched the Grow Your Self podcast in 2020. Do you remember that year? A couple of really significant, world-shifting events happened. So that year, I sat in my closet upstairs in my Illinois bedroom and recorded episode after episode of the podcast while my four kids were at home and learning online (or not learning online).

And it was wonderful, but it was also a lot. So when we hit 2021, I took a step back and focused on a couple of other things for Gardenary.

So this is to tell you the very good news that the podcast is officially back, and we've graduated from my closet in Illinois to this fantastic studio here in Nashville,Tennessee. So what has happened over the last three years? Well, over the next few minutes, I'm just gonna give you a quick rundown of where I've been, what we've been doing, and what is coming your way with the podcast over the next season.

Where Have I Been for the Last 3 Years?

Let's go back to 2021. We were, honestly, still very much in quarantine in some ways in Illinois. My kids were still schooling at home, and that's actually when I had to take a step back from the podcast. Because all four kids were doing school all day at home throughout almost the entirety of the spring of 2021. It was quite a lot.

Gardenary kept growing during that time. We had some fantastic launches and tons of students coming through our programs. In fact, January of 2021 was a phenomenal time, where we had over 600 students from around the country and across the world go through the Kitchen Garden Academy program with me. And it was amazing to see so many people going all in on the garden.

I think that was a time where we had all had the wake-up call of 2020. We had all gone through the summer of 2020, and for a lot of us, it was a little too late to get a garden going, but we were all kind of woken up to the idea of like, "Uh, we need a garden to survive this thing called life."

It was winter of 2021, and the masses came to learn how to set up and grow a garden in the new year. It was phenomenal. I think I had 30,000 people register to come and join me for our Plan Your 2021 Garden Workshop; then about 600 came through the Kitchen Garden Academy course with us. We had regional coaches from all over the US.

It was a phenomenal time and such an amazing moment for me to realize that people's interest and desire to start gardening was just taking off. That the end of quarantine wasn't the end of people's interest in gardening. Even as people were getting to be outside of their home more often, they couldn't unsee that moment when food was in short supply, when we were all kind of in shock and fear for our safety, for our health, for our lives, and also we were all just stuck at home. And so that realization was amazing.

And then we had another incredible group of garden consultants come through our Gardenary training that spring, as well. Very similar to what had happened with the wake up for the garden, I continue to see a very similar awakening for careers. So many people had been working from home, either permanently or temporarily, and they got a little taste of time freedom. You know what I'm talking about? Where they actually got to be at home and cook a few homemade meals and catch up on the laundry and keep up with some things at home while they were working.

And that was the beginning of this shift of people seeing their career in a different light. Also, of course, some people got laid off or had a major change in their career. But we saw so many new people interested in becoming Gardenary consultants. And so that spring was an incredible time to serve those students and watch these people come from having a garden in their backyard to suddenly helping hundreds of people in their towns have gardens in their backyards, as well.

I Wrote a 2nd Book

So that was the beginning of 2021. We made it through the spring and the summer. I had some incredible growth in my Chicago garden, and I signed a book deal for my second book. I had just released Kitchen Garden Revival in 2020, and I had a couple of follow-up ideas because Kitchen Garden Revival was a book that was, I would say, a little bit advanced. It jumps right to setting up a really fantastic, beautiful kitchen garden.

In the middle of COVID when everything was shut down, I realized, "Oh, we need a first step for the people who can't just jump to the fancy raised beds and trellises and a backyard-sized garden. What about the people who just need something they can grow right away?"

So the book ideas started first with just doing greens. I actually proposed to do a whole book just on growing salad. (You know my passion about growing salad greens.) And the first publisher didn't love it. They wanted something a little bit bigger. Anyway, fast forward through all the negotiations and the book talks, and what we landed on was the system that I've taught for years. It's actually hinted at in my first book, Kitchen Garden Revival, and that is my four-step system for learning to grow in the garden. Actually, it's a three-step system, but you know, I sneak in a little fourth one there. 

But basically, the system means starting with leaves, so learning how to grow sprouts and microgreens and herbs and salad greens because those are the simplest things to grow in the garden. And then graduating to root crops, which are still pretty simple. They don't have a a need for that many resources, but they do take a little bit more time and skill as a gardener. And then finishing up with fruiting crops, which are the most complicated and the most time-intensive and need the most skill from the gardener.

I originally named the book Step by Step Gardening. I had this picture in my mind of a staircase, of learning each skill and building on it. And what we ended up with was a book called Leaves, Roots, and Fruit: A step-by-step guide to planting an organic kitchen garden.

I signed the book deal and immediately went to work on photographing and writing the book in 2021. We headed out in the end of summer to one of the Gardenary consultants who you're going to hear from later on this season on the podcast, Katie Oglesby in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. She was like an hour away from me and has—and I'm not exaggerating—the most gorgeous kitchen garden you've ever seen.

Erik Kelley, my photographer, and I headed up there to spend two days with her in her garden to take photographs for the book. And oh my goodness, her garden did not disappoint. She was an in-ground gardener before she started as a Gardenary consultant. She still has her in-ground garden, but she transitioned another part of her yard to be all raised beds, like Gardenary-style gardening. And she outdid herself, let's just say that.

So we took a bazillion photos. I wrote through the end of 2021. We did a fall class for Kitchen Garden Academy and a fall class for garden consultants. And then we headed into 2022.

I Moved to Nashville, Tennessee

Beginning of 2022, I knew personally this was a big year for myself and my family. My oldest daughter was about to be a sophomore in high school. And if you know me, you know my desire was to get back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is the city where I started gardening over a decade ago. I love the seasons here. I love the people here. I love the entrepreneurship here and the opportunities. And I had been itching to get back here for years.

My husband's career had been the one that had pushed us and led us up until that point. All of our moves had been for his work. And he promised me when we moved to Chicago that that would be the last move for his career and the next move would be for mine. I really saw 2022 as the last year I could do that for quite some time. I've got four kids, and they were all born within four and a half years. My oldest was going to be a sophomore, and then the very next year, my son would be a sophomore. And then two years after that, my third would be a sophomore, and two years after that, my fourth will be a sophomore. So I was like, "If we don't leave now, we will not be moving until after 2030."

I continued to work with Gardenary and grow our business and serve our students, but all along, I was also trying to get us down to Nashville, Tennessee, which we finally did in June of 2022. That was a big move for us. Right in the middle of that, we were still doing Kitchen Garden Academy—we had some incredible student wins in that course.

And then we also started a membership that we called Gardenary 365. And the mission and the message of Gardenary 365 was to encourage people to garden and eat from the garden 365 days out of the year. We're going to touch on this a lot in this season of the Grow Your Self podcast: the idea that the garden isn't just for the summer. The garden is something that we should enjoy parts and pieces of in our everyday lives, every day of our lives. And so Gardenary 365 was really a passion project of mine and a way to help everyone start to see that the garden could be part of their everyday routines—just picking a little, eating a little, planting a little, tending a little. And that was a wonderful initiative to start, and we got to see thousands of students come through the Gardenary 365 membership.

I Built My Dream Garden

I got to Nashville and immediately tried to figure out how in the world I was going to set up a kitchen garden in the summer in Tennessee and get it going before fall came. We were settling into our new home here in Nashville. I was checking out my yard, which slopes, as most yards do here in Nashville, and also has very large trees. I had lots of what we call "lovely limitations" to work around. We still made the garden happen. My dad and mom came up for a few weeks to help us get moved in, and I documented the whole thing, so you can check it out on Instagram and on the Gardenary blog and see the changes we made. I ended up doing a garden that's about 40 feet long and about 25 feet wide, and I'll talk about the design and the setup and all that this season on the podcast, as well.

So got that garden done, and in the middle of that, finished my deadline for my book Leaves, Roots, and Fruit. We moved into the fall season here in Nashville. My kids started school, and we had one of the most spectacular classes of garden coaches come through our program. And again, we did a Kitchen Garden Academy class for the fall season.

I was back in Nashville and relearning the seasons, and it was confirmation of the Gardenary system that so many of us can plant and enjoy the garden for so much more of the year than we realize. Even being relatively new to Nashville—I hadn't lived and gardened here since I started gardening in 2010 or 2011—I fell right back into it and was able to make the most of the space and the time. I had harvests in my garden here in Nashville all the way to the New Year.

In fact, we had a major freeze at the end of December, and I was out there scurrying around, just pulling all kinds of wonderful things like peas and radishes and daikons and arugula and spring mix, cabbages, bok choy—so many delicious things even after Christmas. It was so great!

I Hired My Gardenary Team and Worked with Some of My Heroes

So we finally get to 2023. We settled into Nashville, and it was time to build our Gardenary team here. So we started hiring, and our first hire was Molly. She has joined the team since almost a year ago, and it's been huge to have her as part of our team here. She is a videographer and has been such a huge help to me and really helped us at Gardenary to reach so many more people with our message, primarily through video.

We hired some other positions, some administrators, and really started to build out our team here in the city. I started to see the potential of what we can do now that I'm finally settled and back home, where I always dreamt I could be.

This year has been really big too because I've gotten to garden with some of my heroes, people that I've watched for years, and gotten to go into their gardens and show off what they're doing to add the garden to their everyday life. I've gotten to put seeds in the ground right next to them.

First I got to garden with Donald Miller. I don't know if you know him. If you don't, you should. He is a best-selling author. He wrote books like Blue Like Jazz, and then transitioned to business writing. He has a book I absolutely love called Building a Story Brand, which is one of his two major works, along with Business Made Simple. I love learning from him about business and story, and I get to now garden with him and his beautiful wife Betsy and their gorgeous, super fine, hilarious, extremely active, and interested in planting beans daughter.

So I've gotten to garden with Betsy and Donald, with Ellie Holcomb, who is one of my favorite singer-songwriters, J.J. Heller, another favorite singer-songwriter, and many more. I just had the time of my life this year getting to be in the garden with some of my heroes and getting to show that these people who have busy careers and big fans and lots to do also find it super important to have the garden as part of their everyday.

I Grew My Business

We released the book Leaves, Roots, and Fruit in April, which was so much fun. It was amazing to see so many people getting the book into their hands and watching the projects that they created through the spring and the summer of this year.

And, of course, we've gotten to grow our Kitchen Garden Academy students and garden consultants this year, as well. In fact, this has been our biggest year ever for new Gardenary consultants. The trends that started in 2020 and 2021 of individuals ready to make a change career-wise, ready to be a lot more in charge of their time and their mission in life and their finances. That, we get to observe, just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And so this year we have signed up hundreds of new gardeners as garden consultants.

And we had our first ever in-person Gardenary summit here in Nashville. Back in the spring, right around the time my book launched, I got to create this amazing, huge kitchen garden for a place called Juniper Green. Juniper Green is an event space that hosts weddings and parties and all kinds of fanfare at this space, and they wanted to have a kitchen garden right at the center of it. So they gave us full reign, full design power over this place, and to get to transform it into a beautiful kitchen garden complete with native plants and pollinators and fruit trees was incredible.

I thought, "You know, we've made the space, we've got the garden. Let's host our own party." And so in November, we invited the Gardenary consultants to come for two days for an in-person summit. And we pulled it off; it was amazing. We had almost 50 consultants here in attendance. We got to plan out our businesses for the 2024 year.

A lot of these gardeners have joined since 2020, so it really hadn't been possible to see people in person. It was literally the highlight of my year to get to finally meet people that I previously only knew through a Zoom screen.

That was definitely the highlight: doing the Juniper Green kitchen garden installation and then hosting so many of the Gardenary consultants here in November.

(Photo credit: Victoria Quirk Photo)

What's Coming Up on the Grow Your Self Podcast?

That about brings us to this space in time. It is now the end of 2023, and we are recording and prepping and getting ready to come back for the Grow Your Self podcast right here for the year of 2024.

So what's in store? Well, you have got so much to look forward to. We're going to be having long episodes each week as well as really short episodes so that you can listen quickly or long-form—however fits your schedule and what you're up to in that week.

We have some amazing conversations that I got to have with Gardenary consultants, talking about what it's like to grow in their specific area. We have consultants from California all the way to Detroit, Michigan, to North Carolina. We basically span the entire country of the US, and you're going to get to hear from them, get gardening tips from them, and hear about the businesses that they're growing in their own towns and cities.

We're still going to have surprising stories about the foods that we eat. We're going to dive into some things that aren't so public about the foods that we put on our plate. And of course, I'm going to encourage you to try growing your own or to try to find a much better alternative right in your own city or town from a local farmer or CSA.

Then I'm going to give you some major challenges. We have some super fun projects that I'll teach you how to do on a step-by-step basis here on the podcast.

And I'm going to give you some insights into building a garden coach business, as well. So after growing my own business and then watching thousands of garden consultants in the Gardenary program, I'm going to bring you inside what it takes to grow a garden consulting business, just in case you've ever had a little voice in the back of your head that said, "Hmm, I wonder if I could do that?" Well, I'm going to show you how you can take those first steps, and we'll have lots of fun challenges and opportunities for you here, as well.

All right, that about sums it up. I don't know... three years in 30 minutes. Did I cover it all? No, I did not. But those are some of the highlights. Basically, we've been busy growing, busy getting better and better, and busy meeting more and more of you. And I know 2024 is going to be our most phenomenal year yet. And so much of that is going to start right here on the Grow Your Self podcast.

Join Us for Season 2 of the Grow Your Self Podcast

Thanks for coming back or being here for the very first time. This is going to be an incredible year of growing together, and I hope that you'll be here along the ride with me.

I promise I'll show up for you, and I hope you'll show up for me. Now, let's get started growing ourselves in 2024. The time is now!