10 Years, 4 Cities, 8 Gardens

Welcome to the Grow youw Self podcast. Surprising stories about the food we eat and inspiring conversations about what it really takes to live the whole and happy life we're all craving. My name's Nicole Johnsey Burke, and I'm the owner of Rooted Garden and Gardenary Incorporated and author of the upcoming book Kitchen Garden Revival. Is it obvious I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden. Each week here on the Grow youw Self podcast, you're going to be shocked at the things you'll learn about foods you eat every single day. And you'll feel encouraged to take little steps in your own busy schedule to create a more whole and happy life for yourself. So turn up the volume and let's take a walk, go on a drive, or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Every time you listen, I promise you'll learn something that will help you grow yourself in a new and exciting way. Sound good? I think so. Now let's dig in.

It was the summer in Nashville. The kids, then toddlers and babies, and I used a hand shovel and dug a few little holes, scattered the seeds we'd just bought on a whim, and then turned on the water hose. This is going to work, right? We returned to the spot every day, and don't worry, we kept bringing the hose. Every day was the same. Take a look, spray with the hose, look again, walk away. Five, six days and a week passed. Still no sign of anything but dirt. I double checked the seed package. It says here that the seeds will sprout in five to 10 days. We could have waited five to 10 years and would have never seen a plant appear. The seeds had either rotted in the thick Tennessee clay soil or they had been washed away from all that space spraying. Whatever the case, it wasn't working. Clearly, I was a garden professional in the making. This is an Excerpt from Chapter 4 called Phil in my new book, Kitchen Garden Revival, which is now available anywhere you get your books. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, local bookstores. So go get it right now. This episode of the Grow youw Self podcast is brought to you by my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. Thank you guys so much for all your support. The book is now out and available anywhere books are sold when you order it, please send an email with a screenshot of your receipt for a free gift from Gardenary, a mini gardening course called before youe Begin. And when you review the book, also take a screenshot, send it my way so that I can give you my free. It's not free, it's costly. But I'm gonna give it to you for free. My year long planting plan. Your reviews, your purchases mean so much in bringing back the kitchen garden and causing a kitchen garden revival. Today's episode is a special one. I am gonna take you way back and tell you about the 10 years it took for me to become a garden author, garden professional, whatever I am right now. I'm going to tell you why it took 10 years for me to get here. I'm going to tell you about all my gardens that I've been planting in all the different places over the last 10 years. So let's do it. Let's grow ourselves together. Thanks so much for listening. Here we go. Today we're going to take a stroll through time. A stroll through my 10 plus years of gardening in lots of different places. I'm going to tell you about the struggles, the losses, the challenges and how I got to be where I am now. So it's going to be so much fun. I love thinking about the journey that we all go on as we learn anything, but especially as we learn how to garden. My grandfather, Clyde Singletary, he was the head of horticulture at Mississippi State University. And he used to say he was in his, you know, that he could keep learning about plants and their habits and more about growing forever. That it was literally an endless journey of learning. That's what I love. I think so much about gardening is I just can't exhaust the topic. Like, I'm always discovering something new and there's always a surprise, even when I'm growing the exact same thing I grew last year because the weather's always changing and I'm always a different person the next year around. So I'm gonna bring you through my journey. We're gonna go all the way back to Charlottesville. So I was in Charlottesville with Jason, my husband from 2006 until 2010. Jason is a chemist. So we were at UVA in Charlottesville, and that's where we had our first two children, Carolyn and Brennan. And I really wanted to start gard. We lived about a mile from Monticello and I had Carolyn. I was still working for a company in Philadelphia in the area of philanthropy. At the time, I was new to being a mom, trying to figure out how in the world to make my baby sleep. She was a pretty fussy baby. I would take her on walks at Monticello. Monticello is Thomas Jefferson's estate, or at least it was at some point. And he has the most incredible setup of row gardens that overlook the Blue Ridge. Mountains and I could literally walk up there for free because we lived right down the street. So that was my first exposure really to kitchen gardens and the idea of gardening. There's all kinds of education on the idea of growing food around that area because I think largely inspired by Thomas Jefferson. So anyway, between his impact and then I was reading about bunch of mommy blogs at the time, talking about eating organic and being more natural in our food sources, etc. I was definitely itching to start composting and gardening. But I lived in a townhome. So we had one car that was pretty much dying and lots of baby responsibilities, not a lot of time or money and really not a lot of space. So we lived in this townhome. We weren't the end of the row, so we were sandwiched in between. I think it was a row of like 10 or 11 townhomes near Uva because my husband Jason, he would bike to grad school every day. And so anyway, pretty shaded, lots of trees around the area and definitely not a lot of space to grow. My mom came and helped me when I had Carolyn. We put in a front yard landscape project. So we planted some heather, this beautiful heather that ended up bringing in so many bees. That was so fun to watch. And just really some ornamental bushes and stuff on our little. Basically it was like a 2x4 little space in the front of our town home. We planted a cherry tree. Do you guys is this like super hippie? But we, we saved the placenta from Carolyn's birth and planted a pink cherry tree in the front yard of our our townhome, which is now the most gorgeous tree every time we return to Charlottesville. It's just amazing to see the tree in full bloom. It's so gorgeous. The pink cherry blossoms in Charlottesville in the Virginia area every spring just amaze me. So it blooms right around the time of her birthday every year. So fun. But really in terms of edibles, in terms of a kitchen garden, I didn't have much going on when we were at the nursery purchasing those things for the front yard. I think I tell this story in one of my posts here about one of my episodes. I'll have to look up the number, but it's the one where I talk about making money as a gardener. It was when we were purchasing those plants that I saw that lady at the nursery. I think she was tending orchids. And that's when I first had that idea of, ooh, I want to be a gardener as a profession. So that was way back when so that would have been 2007, when we were at the nursery. I did buy a pot of rosemary. I want to say that was probably the first edible plant I ever purchased. And then as we set up the plantings, my mom took some oregano seeds and sprinkled them right underneath those plantings. So I don't even remember if there was a method to her madness. She was just like, you'll have fun with this. You'll love getting to harvest this oregano. So I was like, okay, whatever, mom. I don't think I was even conscious of what was going on. I was like, new mom. You know that new mom haze that you have over your eyes? I had that pretty bad. So, anyway, we planted the front yard landscape ended up turning out to be a really pretty project. And the oregano grew like crazy, and so did the rosemary. So I kept the rosemary outdoors that spring and summer and then brought it indoors, kept it alive, and ended up using it in so many ways, just in dishes and cooking and. And then even eventually planted it in our landscaping in the back and watched it make it through a couple of winters so it would snow and frost, and to my surprise, the rosemary would come back the next spring. So those were really my first few things I grew that were edible. And that was way back in Charlottesville in just a little townhome. So lesson learned here is that you can grow something edible even if you have very little space to grow in, even if you're not yet able to set up a full raised bed kitchen, garden. This is why I love encouraging people to start with herbs. Inside my book, you'll see the four step plan to start gardening. And I always encourage people to start with herbs. And I think this is probably largely inspired by the fact that my first successes were with oregano and rosemary. Well, we soon moved to Nashville, Tennessee. This was again for Jason's work. He was to become a. He was going to postdoc at Vanderbilt. Or he didn't. He wasn't going to. He did. And so by this time, we had our third child. I moved when I was 38 weeks pregnant, and that was crazy. So we resettled in Nashville. This time we were renting, so we did have a yard. But guys, the yard was at a tremendous slope, in fact, to go into our garage in our rental home, you were basically at a. What's that called? Like a 45 degree. I mean, just like a straight down angle. Like your car could literally just crash into the garage if you weren't careful. Ask me how I know. No, I'm just joking. I didn't crash into the garage, just into like my kids tricycles and stuff. So it was really hard to. I definitely had the gardening itch at that point. So 2010 is when I read the book Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and she, if you haven't read that book, you've got to. She, she challenges her and her family to e locally for a year and oh my goodness, it just opened my eyes to the idea of growing locally and eating seasonally and I just really, really, really wanted to. So it was around that time, I think when my third Rebecca was born that my mom again came to visit and help and it was this time when she brought me garlic chives in a pot and she said, you're going to love doing this. It's so fun to just cut fresh chives. Just cut right here. She just showed me how I could cut and they would. So I did. At this time we still, that first summer, we still didn't really have anything growing. So my first few foods obviously that I grew rosemary, oregano and garlic chives. That was the summer of 2010? Well, the summer of 2011. Is this right? I think so, yes. I was pregnant and I was really ready to go all in and set up a garden. So Jason agreed it was the middle of the summer, the timing was totally off, but he agreed that we could go for it. So we actually tried to do a row garden. So we had this little spot at the bottom of the yard that we tilled up. We actually had a friend come over and till up the earth for us. We're in a rental by the way, but our landlord lived in Thailand so we were guessing he wasn't going to be stopping by anytime soon. So we till up this probably it was like 20 by 20 spot, maybe less, maybe 15 by 15, tilled it up and then we planted it with seeds. We planted all kinds of random seeds we found at Lowe's and Home Depot. I think it was like bush beans. And we had some potatoes, corn, I want to say we tried some tomato plants in there. We did some flowers. I tried carrots. I just, I basically, I don't know if you've ever done this in your gardening journey, but I just bought everything that looked good to me and we just went in and planted it all. Well, as you can guess, we didn't have a ton of success. We were at the bottom of this hill, right. So the rains came and as you can imagine, without any kind of barriers or Support a lot of the seeds and even the soil we had kind of turned over and worked. It just washed right down the hillside. So I lost a ton of the things we had planted just to wash out. I didn't know anything about corn, so I didn't realize you needed to plant a large space of corn for it to be able to support one another, to pollinate each other, and to withstand storms. So I think our corn got about, I don't know, 2ft high or something and then all just went down in a Nashville windstorm. That was that with the corn, the tomatoes, I don't think they ever did anything. We had not really amended the soil or anything. We had just basically turned it over. We did, however, get basil and green beans and some potatoes. We got just enough from that first garden to really, really whet my appetite, literally. I loved having a space to go out to with my kids. Just a space to kind of retreat to and discover something new. I was home a lot. I was in what we call nap jail. If you're a mom, you can relate to this. Nap jail is where you have to stay home during certain periods of time, a lot of time during the days, because you need your kids to take naps. And if they don't take naps, they will turn into the most evil creatures you've ever experienced on earth. So I was in nap gel a lot with four kids under four and a half. They all needed. Well, yes, I didn't have the fourth one yet. She was in my stomach. So the other three all needed naps. So I was in nap jail constantly. So the garden was my escape from nap jail. So even though we didn't have a lot of success, I loved it. The next summer, 2012, we learned our lesson. We did amend the soil a little bit, and I want to say we planted that patch up again. But this time, Jason had the wherewithal to try to build up some little raised beds. So I don't even know. I'm trying to remember how high the beds were. I want to say they were like 3 inches tall. I want to say he just bought some little kind of like almost like baseboard type boards or something, like little pieces of lumber, but just enough to add some height. So he moved over to a different space in the yard, put the beds down. He did it basically all himself and brought in some weird, you know, I don't know, whatever soil mixes he could find at the hardware store, and then planted a couple of cherry tomato plants and a few other things, just a Few. I think we had, like, four cherry tomato plants in one box. I tell this story about the tomato plants in my planting chapter of the book. So we had more success in those beds. Those raised beds did so much better than the row gardens that we had tried to the side. So when the rain came, the seeds did not wash out because they were held up with the edges of that bed, even though they weren't very tall. The tomatoes seemed to like the new soil much better than the Tennessee soil. And we actually had cherry tomatoes, so that was super exciting. And we were really going all in as much as we could. At that point, we started composting. We had one of those big, stinky towers, you know, and when you don't know how to compost, it's just, like, a mess in there. Well, we had that, but we were. I was just loving it. I was really, literally getting into it, and the kids were, too. We grew mammoth sunflowers that summer. And I had a whole edge of the yard that I separated as a pollinator garden. So I would go visit my mom often in Mississippi with my kids to get a break, and I would pile. I remember I went to a store in her town, and I think I bought. They had their flowers and things on, like, clearance. And so I literally filled the entirety of my van. Like, any space that a kid was not. I filled it with flowers, brought it home, and planted up this huge pollinator area of our yard to kind of complement the vegetable garden. So much fun. But then it was time to move to Houston. So our third move here. No second move that I'm documenting here. So we moved to Houston. This was for Jason to begin work at MD Anderson. So new climate, totally new place. But we did have our experience of growing the herbs in Charlottesville. So that was our first experience growing in the row gardens in Nashville and then in the small raised beds in Nashville. So when we got to Houston, Jason again. So he's the researcher in our family. I'm kind of the. Just like. More like, hey, let's jump in and do this. And so he researched and found an organization called Urban Harvest and great organization in Houston. And they had a great book that we read about gardening in Houston. So we had already learned that raised beds were going to help us. So we decided we'd do raised beds again. And then we researched that, like, timing and soil and all that kind of thing. So it was the fall of 2000. Gosh. What was that? I want to say 13, maybe. That's right. Yeah. The fall of 2013, we set up our first raised beds. We did three, four by eights. I think that's right. Or four by 10. I think we did three, four by tens all along the driveway in Houston. So we set up these raised beds. They were one foot tall. Jason built them for us. And I tell the story about these beds in the book as well. This time we were much more methodical in terms of the soil we used and the seeds we purchased. We didn't just get them from the hardware store. We ordered them from better providers and wow. Oh, my goodness. So our gardens took off like, that first fall was just amazing. So, first of all, we'd never lived in a climate that we could grow in year round, like in Charlottesville and Nashville. You would for sure be pretty much kind of closing down or at least slowing down the garden in early fall. And instead we were setting up and planting all the things in October for the fall and the winter. So that was really exciting. I was missing so much of the climates I'd lived in previously with, like, the changing colors of the tree leaves and the cooling weather of fall. But this was kind of a way to survive and get through that by getting to not have those types of experience of the change of the season. But to get to be growing in the garden in late fall and into winter was amazing. We had so much lettuce and so many carrots and greens. Our gardens were so productive that first year. And I don't know if it was because the pests in the neighborhood didn't know about them yet or what, but we really didn't have many issues. Very little weeds, very little pest issues. We just enjoyed greens so much. So we were harvesting lettuces every single day for six months from that October all the way to March or April of the next year. And this is when I literally just could not get enough of the garden. We were sharing our harvest with neighbors. I was telling everyone about it. I was just head over heels with what was happening in the backyard at the time. I was still homeschooling. So again, I wasn't in nap jail, but I was in home jail, much like most of us are. If you're listening to this in real time during the pandemic, when we're all home all the time, the garden, I like to say, was my getaway when I couldn't get away. So I would do schooling with the kids in the morning, and we'd go out to the driveway and check out the garden in the middle of the school day, and then as soon as class was over, I'd head out to the garden to go pick and discover and play. It was literally just a total gift and escape for me that I could enjoy without having to leave home. I loved it so much that I started to dream of having a business, of finding some way to share this as a career. So fast forward, that was 2013. So we enjoyed that garden for basically two years. And I got to the fall of 2015, and my vision was that I wanted to grow enough in my own garden to sell the things from my garden. So I told Jason about my dream and that we'd grown so many lettuces, I said, you know, I think I could grow enough lettuces to sell the lettuce either at a farmer's market or to our neighbors or whatever. So he agreed to my dream and we expanded our garden. So we took those three beds apart, split them into six inch tall boxes, and instead of having three beds, we had six beds. So we turned them all the other direction, and I planted all of them up with greens with the vision that I would be selling greens for a living. So that's when I started Rooted Garden Goods, if you know the story of my business. So I first founded Rooted Garden as Rooted Garden Goods, because I was literally going to sell goods from my garden. It only took a few times of washing all those lettuces to realize that this was not really going to be necessarily a match for me in terms of the best career choice. So I ended up going back, taking back the name of my business from Rooted Garden Goods and changing it to Rooted Garden. A friend suggested to me that instead of growing things for people, I teach people how to grow. And that was a much better fit for my personality. But I was left with these six beds. That was really the next garden setup. I have six beds all facing. They're basically running from north to south, which is not ideal, but they were running from north to south and planted up with tons of greens. So I had those from the fall of 2015 until the fall of 2017. So really, the first two years of my business, the beds were like that. So just six inches deep. And a lot of people often ask me about, when you set up a raised bed, does it have to be deep? How deep does it need to be? Well, I can tell you because I've grown in all the different depths, so generally, six inches is going to be pretty good for greens. And that was one of the reasons why we didn't add depth when we multiplied the beds out because greens have a very shallow root system, but for growing other things like deeper rooted vegetables, like carrots, radishes, beets, and then definitely growing fruiting vegetables, or I guess they're actually called fruits. But tomatoes, cucumbers and squash, zucchini, those actually have deeper roots, so they're going to prefer even up to 18 inches depth of a bed. I did struggle in those two years. My tomatoes did okay, but not as good as they had done in deeper beds. But the greens did totally fine and great in six inches. Well, during these two years of running rooted garden, I was setting up all kinds of gardens all over the city and had really gotten exposed to honestly, higher end and just more beautiful gardens because of my clients. Clients would ask me to design gardens for them. And I had been privileged to create some of the most beautiful gardens I've ever seen and actually install them for my clients. You'll see so many photos of these gardens at Gardenary company and definitely in my book. So my mom is an interior designer and I've never thought of myself as a designer or like having her gifts because honestly, I don't really thrive doing that kind of thing inside. But I do find that I guess maybe I inherited some of her designer gene. But the way it comes out for me is with gardens. And so anyway, I got exposed to these beautiful gardens and I ended up creating gardens that I just loved so much. And so I wanted to recreate that on a smaller level for myself. So in the fall of 2017, I did a garden makeover. So I took those six beds, we pulled those out, reserved the soil, cleared up the space. Previously, I'd been using pine straw in between all my beds. And then I guess we did switched to gravel. So we went back to the original design, back to the three beds going from east to west, back up to one foot tall. I used the garden kits that we sell at Gardenary and Rooted Garden, put those kits together, and had my team put in drip irrigation. So up until this point, I'd never had irrigation in any of my beds. It was all up to me. So the busier I got with my business, the harder it was to to keep up with all my gardens. So I had those six gardens, which I realized for me was honestly too much space. I just didn't have the time to handle all six of those gardens. So by going back to three gardens, that felt much more manageable to me. And then adding the drip irrigation also helped so much. Houston does have a good bit of rain, but the summers are pretty Brutal. And you can go for, say, a month or more where the temperatures are over 90 degrees and there's no rain. So the drip irrigation system was huge for me. Then for my birthday, I had ordered some custom trellises, some custom arch trellises for one of our wonderful clients. And when they came, they were the wrong size. So the metal artist had made a huge mistake and not made them wide enough for the bed. So it was on them, not on me. I had given them the right specs, thankfully. But anyway, they drove up. It was in the middle of that previous summer, and the trellises were wrong. And then we had to delay it, yada, yada. Anyway, that client finally got the best beautiful arch trellises in the world. But around my birthday, I remembered, like, oh, I wonder if they still have those trellises that they messed up on. So I contacted them, and I was like, do you guys still have those trellises? And they were like. Like, yeah, they're sitting in our warehouse. And I was like, all right, well, how much will you sell them to me for? So they gave me a deal because they were obviously ready to get rid of them. And I got to add these beautiful custom arch trellises to my garden that I otherwise probably never would have gone for or afforded. So I tied the three beds together with two arch trellises and had such a lovely birthday present that I gave myself. And then a spring, and then it was that next spring, unfortunately, that. Well, I mean, fortunately for Jason, but I had just gotten this beautiful garden, and then it was time to move again. So Jason was transferred to the Chicago area for his work. He works in pharmaceuticals. And so it was time for us to pick up and go again. So I had to say goodbye to my beautiful new kitchen garden and head to Chicago. So I've got two gardens. Gardens left to tell you about. When we got here, the previous owner. We live in a modern farmhouse in the suburbs in northwest Chicago, and we have a very large yard, but it's mostly shaded. The backyard is very shaded. And so. But when we got here, the previous owner had a raised bed. Very large raised bed. It's like 16ft long, 1 foot tall, and probably 5ft deep. It was really overgrown. Loads of weeds and. And all kinds of mess in there. But I knew I needed the garden to get me through. I was pretty down about my move to Chicago. Things were really thriving with my business in Houston, and I loved all the things that were happening there. I knew this was the right move for our family, but I was really struggling. So the garden really had become, like I told you, like, my place for, you know, like, therapy. So I needed that here. I didn't have time or space or the resources. I had the space, but not the resources at the moment to set up a garden. Plus, I wanted to have, you know, a summer under my belt to kind of see what it was like growing here. So I just planted up the garden that existed. I added new compost. I pulled all the weeds and planted tomatoes and peppers and greens and all kinds of things just to kind of experiment and learn the climate. So that summer was pretty much a flop. I mean, I got a good bit of basil, lots of herbs out of the garden, a few peppers and a few tomatoes, but not much. Basically, the garden was set up in the wrong place. So there was a tree on the south side of the garden that pretty much shades it for the majority of the summer. So I was able to go out there some and enjoy it, but it was kind of a disappointment. So, yeah. So this brings me to my final garden. Not my final forever, because I'll be gardening, I'll always be creating new gardens, but the one I have now. So last spring, April of 2019, I had just signed my contract for my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. I knew I had hundreds of gardens I could photograph in Houston, but I lived here now. I planned on going back, and I knew we would to document the gardens for the book. But I knew that I also needed my own garden, too. So I had been plotting, kind of looking at my property over the previous year, trying to figure out where the sunshine was, where the garden would line up best with my home. So we had this space on the side of my home where it was a paved sidewalk that was all kind of cracked and messy, and we kept the garbage cans over there. So I had just been eyeing that space. It had really good sunlight. It lined up really well with my home, and it was kind of an eyesore at this point. So I just kept thinking it over, thinking it over, but I was really hesitating. And my mom said, nicole, you have got to set up that garden. You cannot write this book without having your own kitchen garden. So I finally went for it. I asked the guys who. The big thing was getting that cement out of the way, right? So I asked. We had some contractors who were helping us do some things in our home. Our home kind of needed to be all updated on the interior, so it was just like a slow progress thing. So I had them come and tear up the sidewalk First. So that was the first step. So they literally filled an entire dump truck with all that cement that was in the way of the garden. And then I started trying to level it and tear it out myself. I can remember going out there with my daughter one day on the weekend, said, do you want to help me with a project? So we started trying to tear it out. It was a very unlevel area, and we put a few shovels into the ground, and I could quickly tell this was in over my head in terms of my physical ability. The ground was still pretty cold and hard because we were in, like, March, early April in the Chicago area, long before the last frost date. And it was just a lot of work. So, anyway, I just was getting closer and closer to needing to have a garden ready for documenting, for the book. And so I finally called a landscaper, and I asked them if they would consider setting up the space for me. So they came over, and I told them my vision and my design, and they gave me a pretty reasonable estimate. So we scheduled it all right around the time that Eric Kelly, my photographer, would be here. So he was coming the middle of April. And I hired the landscapers to help me clear the space, and then I hired my contractors. I showed them photos of all the cedar gardens that I've built for our clients in Houston. I said, can you build me these? I'd never done that here, you know, being in a new place. So he looked very carefully at all my photos. He said, yes, I can do that. So, anyway, so we documented the whole thing. The crazy thing was the Sunday before Eric arrived, on Wednesday, it snowed 8 inches here. So I was just in the depths of despair, absolutely convinced that this garden transformation was not going to happen. The book wasn't going to happen. The world was falling apart. But to my surprise, the next day, it warmed up quickly. All the snow melted, and we were able to get the garden completely installed. While Eric was here, he got to take all the pictures, which are now all inside of my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. My garden ended up exploding with growth. So we had it all set up in April. Eric basically documented the whole space, but when he drove away in his Uber, he lives in Charlottesville. Actually, when he drove away in his Uber, the garden was empty. It was just soil and trellises. And then we met later in May to go to Houston to photograph all the gardens that at that time were doing just exploding with growth, because May is basically August in terms of the rest of the country's climates, you know. But my Garden here was still very barren in even the middle of May, so we don't really pass our last frost date until around Mother's Day. So I planted the garden full of plants and seeds around the middle of May, and in June, we had a load of rain. Oh, and by the way, these beds I set up are two feet tall and basically two and a half by seven feet long. I have six beds here, but the beds aren't as low to the ground as the ones I had in Houston, and they're not quite as big. So. Yeah, so I just. I kept watching the garden there just taking off. I used my soil recipe, I used my planting methods that I'd used in Houston, and then I just got to watch the magic happen. So good timing, right? I mean, it would have been a total bummer if all my methods had failed me. And when Eric came back in August, there was, like, nothing growing in the garden. But we did schedule him to return one more time. So he came here in August, and we documented all the growth of the garden. So it was that time that we took pictures for the COVID of the book, and we did this fun harvest day. So I harvested all these things from the garden, and then the girls and I worked in the kitchen literally all day long, cooking and creating all these different dishes. And then it all kind of came together in this crazy way by the end of the night. Eric documented us all sitting down and pretending to be like a, you know, like a sane family, having dinner together on our back deck, which never happens in real life, by the way. And even for the photos, we took the photos, and then I got up and brought Brennan to taekwondo and Carolyn to soccer practice and things like that, but that the story of my garden. So we started all the way back in 2007 with Rosemary and oregano growing in my front landscape. To our row gardens that pretty much failed us and washed away in Nashville. To our short little beds and our huge sunflowers. And then all the way to our prolific lettuce gardens in Houston, the split six beds that helped me start Rooted Garden in 2015. The refined makeover that I did in 2017, going back to three gardens, gardens with my new arch trellises that I got from a client's rejects. And then my bad garden that existed here before, from the previous owner to my new beautiful, prolific gardens that are featured in Kitchen Garden Revival. I hope that this story gives you a picture of a gardener's journey, that it really is a journey. It's about planting one thing, learning from it and then moving to the next one. I hope you can also see my journey that I teach through gardenary. So I began with herbs in Charlottesville growing rosemary, oregano, and then I moved to Chives in Nashville. So I learned to grow herbs. And then the first success I had in Houston was with salad, right? So we grew enough greens to eat from the garden every single night for more than six months. And then as I began to grow more, I learned to grow tomatoes and, and peppers and carrots and root crops. Things that you're going to see me harvest from my Chicago garden that's two feet tall and more ornate and set up a little bit more beautifully somewhere in the middle there. As I began to master my kitchen garden, I began to teach other people. So it was I guess 10 years in, around 2,000 or about eight years in, in 2015 from that first, first rosemary plant that I began teaching with Ruta Garden and became a garden coach. This is really the gardenary path. This is the gardenary journey that I teach and have created products around for herb gardening. I have an herb garden guide where I teach people how to start growing herbs. It's a three module course and there's also an ebook that goes along with it and it teaches you how to grow and contain. Then I have a salad school course that's the second step where I teach you how to set up a raised bed where you can grow salad year round. Then I have a kitchen garden academy where it teaches you how to set up a raised bed with trellises and pathways and borders, just like the kitchen gardens that I do for my clients and that I did in my own backyard here, my side yard here. And then I have the Garden Coach Society where I teach gardeners how to take their own gardening experience and set up their own garden business as a result of that and grow a profitable business based on teaching from their own experience and knowledge in the garden. So I hope that you can see how I basically have just taken my own experience and then reflected it in my business and in the educational pieces that I've created. It truly is all created from my own experience. It's been so fun to go through this kind of, of trace back through time of my own journey today. I hope that it inspires you, whether you are that person who is growing rosemary in a pot or you're that person who just had a total flop of a row garden, or you've had your first successful cherry tomato growth, whatever. And wherever you are in your journey, I hope that you feel encouraged by my own story that where you are is exactly where you need to be. And the experiences you're having this spring and this summer are going to prepare you for the next one. And you'll take the lessons that you learn with each seed and with each plant that you have right now, and you'll be able to apply it and grow to the next level in the years to come. If you had told me way back in 2007 when I saw that lady in the nursery pruning those orchids and my mom sprinkled that oregano in my front yard, that eventually I'd write a garden book and run a gardening business, would have literally laughed in your face. But each little plant, each little seed that we enjoy, honestly, we never know where it's gonna take us and that is part of the fun of the journey. So thanks so much for taking this journey with me. I really appreciate it and I hope that you feel inspired to grow yourself too. I'll see you next week. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast this week. Don't forget that this episode is brought to you by my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. I'm hoping, hoping that this book will become a best seller. It's very, very rare for a gardening book to become a bestseller and I'm not expecting mine to do it overnight, but I know over time, just like happens in the garden, this book can pick up speed and popularity and you can help make that happen. So please buy the book if you haven't already. Please leave a review on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, wherever you like to leave Book reviews, screenshot both your receipt and your review and email them to helloardenary.com we will set you up with our mini gardening course and our 50 page year long planting course plan. I love you so much for your support. I could not bring back the Kitchen garden without you and I can't wait to hear your own gardening journey and how we get to to grow together in this season. Thanks again for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. I'll see you next.