How to Find Money for the Garden

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. I'm Nicole Johnsey Burke, your host and the owner of Rooted Garden and gardenary Incorporated and author of Kitchen Garden Revival. Is it obvious yet? I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden. The kitchen garden may just be the answer that you've been looking for on your own journey to health and wholeness in this podcast. It's gonna inspire and enable you to make garden magic right in your very own space. If you're someone who wants to eat more good food that's actually good for you, fill your day with great stories you want to text to a friend. If you wanna hear more about inspiring people and do a little bit each day better than the way you did it, the Grow Yourself is what your ears have been waiting for. You won't just learn about gardening here. You'll learn how to make growing as a person a big part of your everyday life. And your life, your community. And your garden, of course, will be all the better for it. So put in your headphones, turn up the volume, and let's take a walk, go on a drive, or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Welcome to Grow Yourself. If you want to be Gwyneth Paltrow, read this book and use its instructions to create clickbait. There are some solid ideas here, but US$30 can be better spent on seedlings and starter plants than this book, which in my honest opinion is Gardening for Millennials with money. That's a pretty harsh review of my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, and it is the topic we're gonna dive into today. Money, money, money, money. We're gonna talk about how to find the money for your kitchen garden. I'm gonna let you hear some pretty harsh reviews I've gotten about the money issue and my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. And we're gonna dive in because this is week two to numero dos of Kitchen Garden Revival Book Club. We're gonna dive in to the cash today and what it really takes to build a kitchen garden and how you can find the money you need to do it. Sound fun? I think so. Let's dive in. Today's episode is brought to you by Gardenary coaches. That's right. We are here to serve you as your garden coach. I've been training gardeners around the country for the past two years through the gardenary system and they are ready to help you set up your Own kitchen garden. And speaking of money, it saves you money because you're going to end up spending money only on the things that you need rather than running to the plant store and just buying up everything that looks cute to you. So go check it out@gardenary.com coaches, get yourself set up with a Gardenary garden coach and be well on your way to creating your kitchen garden, too. All right, let's dive in to today's episode, how to find money for your kitchen garden. Let's do it. Welcome back to the Grow youw Self podcast. I am so thankful you are here. Did you know we are at over 55,000 downloads for this little podcast here? Can you believe it? So exciting. Thank you so very much for subscribing, for leaving a review. Every time you do that, it provides social proof that kitchen gardens are a thing again. Kitchen gardens are making a comeback and that maybe somebody who's searching for a podcast for something that's gonna give them some encouragement and hope. Hopefully they'll find it here at Grow youw Self. So thank you guys so much for listening, for letting me hang out with you. I've heard so many of you say that you pop in your earbuds when you', gardening, when you're walking, when you're exercising, or when you're doing all these tasks that we have to do at home, like, I don't know, folding laundry and cooking dinner and stuff like that. So thanks for hanging out with me. So many good new episodes coming your way. As we walk through the Kitchen Garden Revival Book Club together. We're going to be diving in behind the scenes. If you did not listen to episode 30, you got to do so because we talk all about the preface and introduction and I really, really bring you behind the scenes on why of how I set up the book. So today we're going to talk about money because that is really. It's what I dive into in chapter one. It's not all of chapter one. There's so many other parts, but I do go into the money input aspect, and I got some pretty harsh reviews about money all over the interwebs. So I just figure, might as well lay them all out there. I actually did this on Instagram back in May, I guess May or April. I had stumbled upon these Goodreads reviews. Now, Goodreads, most of these people, they get a copy of the book for free. So they're probably not in my audience anyway. They're not familiar with the work that I do. Oh, my goodness. They were the first ones to put out reviews on the Internet. Amazon doesn't allow interviews. I mean reviews until the book actually releases. But Goodreads does, and I wasn't even looking for the reviews. Honestly. I've heard not to read reviews from wise mentors I follow like Brene Brown, but I just was looking through things as the book was about to come out and stumbled upon these 3, 4, 5 pretty harsh reviews altogether, those being the very first ones that I read. I was like, ouch. My spirit, my ego. I picked myself off the ground. But it is true when you put the facts out there and you tell your story, you open yourself up to criticism. So I'm okay with that. I thought I'd just go ahead and read those to you and that'll kick us off to talk about how to find money for your own kitchen garden. All right, so I started this one in the intro, but basically this person I will not name them, but they say be prepared for honesty. Why? Because this book made me almost angry. Kitchen gardens or allotments, community garden plots, et cetera, are an incredible way to get fresh veggies and fruit into hungry bodies that are craving fresh foods. Eating cheaply. And she wrote cheaply with all caps for emphasis. But this book is all about creating beautiful gardens and then posting the results on social media. It goes through how to make beautiful kitchen gardens in the most expensive way possible when all one needs is some good dirt and some basic wood and hardware and to make a raised bed in your backyard. Or in my case, a small one on a balcony and my 6x6 allotment plot. Exclamation point. If you want to be Gwyneth Paltrow, read this book and use its instructions to be clickbait. There are some solid ideas here, but US$30 can be better spent on seedlings and starter plants than this book, which in my honest opinion is gardening for Millennials with money. So yeah, she didn't. She didn't like this. So anyway, let's see, let's see another one. Cha cha cha. She does. Okay, so another one says she was a little bit nicer. She says, you know, there are parts of this book, this lavishly illustrated new garden book that I really liked and parts that had me rather frustrated. The author helps homeowners set up kitchen gardens and also has maintained her own at many houses over the years. She tends towards high end expensive gardens and the instructions reflect this. I cringe to see how much she estimated it would cost to put in your own kitchen garden, as it's just not that expensive at all if you don't care about the fancy aesthetic. My own kitchen gardens are simple raised beds that my husband and kids built with inexpensive safe lumber, homemade compost, and good Minnesota dirt. It's true they don't offer the gorgeous architectural design of Burke's beautiful raised beds and metal arches, but at the heart of it, a kitchen garden is just about growing food. We'll talk about that in a little bit. Burke does give good advice. Blah, blah, blah. Okay, but then she says Burke is quite a cheerleader. Thank you. I am a cheerleader, in fact, which new gardeners may find encouraging. I would have liked to see more examples of simple kitchen gardens like those of our grandmothers. Okay, my grandma ran a university, but other grandmothers had inspirational kitchen gardens. Readers who are looking for modern, beautiful kitchen gardens will be especially happy with Burke's ideas. But all gardeners are likely to find something useful or inspirational. So she did end it on a kind note, which was nice. Here's another one. As I expected when I first looked into the book, it's a complete guide for anyone who's gardening for the first time. Before I got deep to the book, I have to admit I enjoyed the beautiful photography and intricate gardens created by the author. That being said, the reader does need to realize that the author is not making an inexpensive garden, but something that is aesthetically pleasing, especially for those of us who live in a subdivision or maybe dealing with a homeowners association. While this may not seem like a huge deal, a good bit of time we spent focusing on making raised bed garden and techniques for making it said garden appealing. While there are some areas talking about having a ground garden, this is not the book for you if you want to be as low cost as possible. All right, so they go on. There are just a number of people. Here's another one. This book has potential. It does have useful information and beautiful photographs. But it just sat the wrong way with me. This is rich people gardening and all gardening needs is some good soil, seeds and a willingness to get your hands dirty. You can do it in your yard, on your fires, on your apartment balcony. It doesn't have to be flawless. Repeat after me. I really don't need X amount of money to have the ideal garden for my needs. So yeah, anyway, most of the people who liked to tear me apart a little bit, most of them then said thank you for NetGalley or whoever for giving me this book for free. So obviously they didn't go looking for the book anyway. But anyway, it hurts. It always Hurts when you get torn apart a little bit like that. So I thought it'd be so fun to dive into the idea of money and the garden, how much a garden costs, and how to find your own money for the garden. And as always, I like to approach, you know, the money issue a little differently or just I love to approach any topic in a different way, kind of look at it in a new perspective. So let me open up my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, to chapter one. Can you hear the pages here? And we're gonna talk a little bit. So chapter one really brings you through. It's called site, and it's all about starting to pick the site for your garden and start to kind of envision what it's going to look like. So I do talk about the inputs, you know, how much space, how much time, how much money. And I do dive into the money pretty honestly. And I think that's part of what I got torn apart for by these reviewers. Because if you read most gardening books, very few of them spe speak about money. That's mostly because those gardeners have never sold gardens. I am approaching this as a business owner, as someone who does this service for others, who's done it for hundreds of others of clients. I've seen the shock on people's faces of how much things cost. To be fair, my business still doesn't have the profit margins that it should. When you are measuring how a business should run and what the profit margins need to look like. Even some of these numbers, honestly, from a business standpoint, are conservative. And I just wanted to put it out there because I think that it's a missing piece in so many gardening books of what things actually cost, even as I did it. And honestly, when I read the reviews, I thought, oh, I need to go in and delete. I'm going to delete that chart so nobody can see it for the second round of printing. Because I felt, you know, embarrassed and humiliated. But it's still there, and it's on page 29, so. So I have it there for. So that, you know, people actually know what things cost. I feel like even. I don't know if you've experienced this, but I'll watch, like a HGTV show or something, and they show the numbers for renovations, and I'm like, wow, I've never gotten numbers that low when I've asked someone to do renovations in my home. So I just feel like oftentimes we're not presented with the facts of what things actually cost. That being said, I did create all these gardens in Houston, Texas, and that is a thriving economy. It's a very busy, bustling city with lots of commerce and lots of economic growth. Things inside the city probably cost more than they would for you if you're living in a more rural setting or a place that doesn't have necessarily the economy, activity and growth that was happening inside of Houston. And it's still happening as I grew rooted garden. So obviously it's always going to be location specific. And so I think I even said that at the time of this writing. You know, these are the numbers in Houston. Okay, I'm going to go to page 27 and talk a little bit about input. So here we go. Now that you know the total space available for each potential spot in your landscape, consider the amount of time you'll have for your garden. For time, you may only have a few minutes at the start or end of the day, or you may have a few hours each weekend. Adding kitchen garden duties will slowly become part of your daily routine. But if you work full time, have kids soccer games every weekend, or travel a lot, it's important to think about time and time constraints at this point rather than after you've installed a large garden. Time needs for the garden will vary from week to week and season to season, and some plants require much less tending and attention than others. But these are the general guidelines to consider. You'll need more time for the garden at the beginning and end of each season. In the beginning, you'll need time to find and source plants and seeds, and then have an extended period of time for planting and seeding. And at the end of each season, you'll need time to harvest and use your plants, and then time to pull spent plants and start again for the following season. In the middle of each season, you'll mostly need time to tend and regularly harvest from your garden. This can be a little each day, but should come to about 1 minute per square foot or 30 minutes per 30 square feet per garden per week. Basically, you need about 2 minutes per square foot for the planting and harvesting and about 1 minute per square foot per week during the tending season. After you consider your time, it's time to consider your money. If you've spent any time online, you've likely seen all the claims that gardening will save you loads of money. Did you guys notice that in those reviews that gardening equals cheats? It's to get food cheaply. That's the point of gardening. So here's some quotes I've seen Never buy an avocado again, do this and you'll never spend money on celery. Save hundreds at the grocery store each month by doing this These posts remind me of the time we installed our kitchen garden in Houston. My husband bought the untreated cedar and built the beds himself. We ordered the best soil we could find and we did all the shoveling. We used pine straw for the ground cover and planted nearly everything by seed. Though we did the work ourselves and tried to buy the least expensive versions of high quality materials, we still spent more than $2,500 on our 120 square foot kitchen garden. I felt more than a little guilt over the cost of the whole setup, so I'd proudly report to Jason every time I skipped buying boxes of organic lettuce, kale and parsley at the store. Jason I saved $19 today. He'd just laugh. How many grocery store trips skipping past salad boxes would it take to make up our $2,500 investment? I'll tell you the answer too many. There are times when harvest will save you at the grocery store, but I'm sorry to say the kitchen garden isn't really a way to save money, especially in the beginning. So do yourself and your partner a favor and don't expect to make money on the deal. Instead, see your garden as an investment in your home and landscape, like buying a nice piece of furniture, splurging on a beautiful piece of art, or adding on a new room. Consider money spent in the garden, like money spent on gym equipment, a club membership or music lessons. Or simply consider it as paying for a doctor's visit. The saying is a little lame, but it doesn't mean it's not true. Gardening is cheaper than therapy and you get tomatoes it would take quite a few therapy sessions to equal the cost of a kitchen garden, but you will at least get to eat your results as you plan your garden. The investment and costs will add up quickly. So do a check on your bank account, on your home improvement budget, on your fun money, and see how much you can afford to invest in your garden. For this first round. You can start simply for a few hundred dollars or invest more significantly with a few thousand for money. You'll need anywhere from $25 to $50 per square foot for a DIY wood garden installation. If you'd like a kitchen garden company to install, find one in your area@gardenary.com Turnkey installations usually start at around $100 per square foot. And then I have my chart that probably caused people to write those really negative Reviews because some of the gardens on there are more than a few thousand dollars. So what's the deal here? We got cheap food, and that gardening is supposed to be about getting food cheaply. And then we have the reality of the marketplace of buying nicer things and setting things up more properly, and the fact that that's going to cost more money. So how do we find money for our kitchen garden? That's what we're going to talk about today. Now, landscapers, how much should you spend on landscaping for your home? So I studied this when I first started rooted Garden because I was curious, because I knew for my own kitchen garden, I spent a great deal of money. So just for instance, this past weekend, I added compost to of my beds, and I did not have enough homemade compost to add to the beds, so I went and purchased some. I purchased mushroom compost. I purchased it as inexpensively as possible. My garden is only less than 100 square feet, and I needed to purchase up to 10 bags. Each of those bags cost $5. So 10 times 5 is $50. So I spent over $50 just on compost this weekend to amend my bed. And that's not like we're not even talking about plants or seeds or beds or anything, just the compost, right? So I knew from my own experience that kitchen gardens cost money. And as I was setting up rooted garden, I thought, I need to have some backing here. Is it worth people spending money on a kitchen garden setup? So I started researching how much should people spend on landscaping? So most real estate estimators and most home professionals estimate that you should probably spend about 10 to 15% of your home value on landscaping. So if your home's value is worth about 100,000, then that means you should spend about 10,000 on landscaping. And then we can go up from there, right? So if your home is worth 200, then you should spend 20,000. If your home's worth 300, you should spend 30,000. Now, the kitchen garden is just a small part of your overall landscaping plan, but I can tell you that it is a very important one. In fact, I experienced this firsthand when we sold our home in Houston, Texas. So I had invested quite a bit in the landscaping around our home, but the kitchen garden was definitely a place where I'd spent a good bit of money. In fact, I just renovated. You can hear about that. I think it's episode 19 and the girl who Planted Gardens. I talk about how we had just redone our kitchen garden in Houston before we moved. Well, the realtor wanted to put the photo of the kitchen garden as one of the main photos in our real estate listing for the home. And it became a key selling point, actually, as she marketed our home around Houston. And even when people put offers on the home, would you believe this? One of the first offers that was made on our home had in the notes that they wanted the garden trellises included. Is that funny or what? So they were obviously valuing what I had done in the kitchen garden much that they wanted to be sure. They didn't say, like, we want the curtains and we want the this. They just said, we definitely want the trellises. I thought that was awesome. So keep that in mind that even the experts recommend in terms of seeing your home's value, that your landscape should have at least 10% of your investment in your property. So if you're going to spend, say, 10,000 on your whole landscape, then why not consider at least 10% of that going to the kitchen garden? So let's say if you're going to put 10,000 in your total landscape area, then let's put 1,000 toward the kitchen garden. That's going to be a central feature of your landscape. It's going to be a place where you can grow food and have special experiences, and we're going to dive into that today. So as I've grown, rooted garden, and marketed my services and helped even my garden coaches around the country grow their own garden coach businesses, money is an issue that's constantly coming up, and a phrase I hear more often than not is, I'd love to garden, but I don't have the money to make it happen. So here's what they're actually thinking when they say, this gardening requires a lot of money, at least your style of gardening, just as these nice reviewers like to point out. And I spend all my money on other stuff. But here's the magic. The price of a garden is less about how much you save, even though Pinterest and YouTube would try and convince you otherwise. And it's actually more about how much you receive. So I challenge my students to not start by thinking about the cost of their garden, but to start by thinking about the value of it. That's part of what I saw in these negative reviews, is that everything, their total focus from the beginning was the cost of the garden instead of what was actually the value of what what they were seeing inside the book. So here's the way to have enough money to create the garden you want is to slow down, take some time, and assess the garden's value in the first place. So let's dive in to four aspects, four things that I think the garden provides for us in our everyday lives and why it is such a unique value to add to our property, to add to our ownership, to add to our lives. So the first is experience. The second is health, the third is beauty, and the fourth is community. So let's first talk about experience. These are the things that are going to happen to you inside the garden. Now, I like to say gardening is similar to a lot of different things. And I noted this even in my chapter. First, it's kind of like a counseling session. People love to quote that quote, that gardening is cheaper than therapy. And it's because really, gardening feels like therapy. So if you've ever paid for a counseling session, or if you've ever had just a really good chat with your friend, or if you've ever meditated or had some prayer time or quiet time that brought you back to life in a new way, you know exactly what I'm talking about when I'm talking about therapy. And the garden really is a place of therapy, a place to clear your head, to give you some space to think and to notice yourself, your thoughts, your emotions in a new way. And yeah, it's basically like a counseling session. So that's one experience you'll have in the garden. The second experience you can have in the garden is education. So the garden is a place where you're going to learn so many new things. It's literally like going to class. Class. It's like signing back up for college again, but only no grades and no tests. That's the best, right? I have found that I've learned so many things inside the garden. And it's really one of those experiences that's kept me coming back to the garden again and again. I love being a learner and I love discovering new things. And the garden has definitely been a place where that is possible. So the second experience you can expect inside your garden is learning, getting to discover things. I remember well, even I was chatting with someone today. I did a post about pollinating my squash and moving a male flower over to a female flower. And I got a dm and this lady said, can you tell me what a male flower looks like? So I explained it to her and showed her some photos. And she said, shh, don't tell anybody. I am like, I work at a biology something. Anyway, she's very professional, educated woman. And I said, don't worry, most people don't know what this is anyway, no matter their level of education. So I just think it's so neat that as adults, this can be a place where we can keep learning, where we can feel forever young because we're preschoolers again, where each new thing is a wonder to us. And I'm constantly, constantly learning new things in the garden. And it's just. It's like a classroom for me, only I don't have to spend, you know, 20,000 a year on tuition to go there. The third experience that is so fun about the garden is it's like a workshop. So these things are huge now. Have you seen that show? Is it called Making it or something like that? And, you know, the Etsy movement, There's so much going on right now to help us get to use our hands again, because we really left the that space for a long time when everything went digital, right? And everything became where we were just online all the time. So there's been this huge movement, this huge push to go back to handmade, to go back to making things ourselves. And the garden is literally like a workshop. Every time I go into the garden, it's like an opportunity to make art, to build something, to create something, to tie something together, to trim something up. Tried a lot of other arts and crafts, like I tried painting and sewing and, oh, my Lord, let me show you one day the sewing projects I attempted with my kids, but I never could stick to any of them. But the garden has become this workshop, this place where I can go and make things and build things and pull things together in such a unique way. It's literally like attending a workshop every time I step out there. The fourth experience that you'll find in the garden is. Is a gym membership. That's right. This is a place where you get to go and work out. Move that body, girl. So I talked about this in the episode where we discuss mental health, where I said garden for your mind first and then your stomach. And the fact that gardening has been shown not necessarily to really increase your heart rate or be aerobic activity, but that it is this place where you end up moving your body over a long period of time because you're doing something purposeful as you're moving. And so it's been shown that people who garden actually have great cardiovascular health. They walk many more steps than people who don't garden. It is literally like heading to the gym, only when you're done, you get to walk out with a bowl of salad that you grew yourself. So those are four experiences that you get to have inside the garden. Pretty fun, right? All right, the second thing we're gonna talk about is the health aspect of the garden. So first, let's talk about nutrition. When you harvest food right from the garden and put that food in your mouth, directly in your mouth, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Just put it in. You get literally the most nutrition you can find on the planet. You cannot go to the store and buy vitamins that will provide more nutrition for you than that. You cannot buy food from the farmer's market, even definitely not from the grocery store that's going to have more nutrition than the food that you pull out of a garden and pop into your mouth. So any. Any investment you've ever made into shakes and powders and vitamins and nutrition plans, you literally cannot invest in anything more valuable than pulling a cherry tomato off the vine and popping it into your mouth within two seconds. I'm telling you, the second thing you get in terms of your health is you get quantity. So when you are buying from the store, from the farmer's market, you are always going to limit ourselves because of money, right? So we'll buy a certain amount, and then we'll stay stop. Either because we won't use it up in time, or we just feel like, whoa, that's a lot of money for all those greens. But when you are growing your own, you can literally just pick and pick and pick and pick some more. So you can end up really topping yourself off with tons of nutrition and greens again and again in great quantity. The next thing that affects your health in terms of the garden is variety. You're going to get to try all kinds of foods you never tried before. And what that means is you're going to get more vitamins, more nutrients, because you're trying. Your body is getting to taste all these different colors and vegetables that you just can't get from the store. So I tried this year to grow kohlrabi. I must say, it was kind of a fail, But I did end up harvesting three or four and used up the greens as well. And though I've seen some kohlrabi at the grocery store, none look quite like mine, I must say. The colors and the varieties that I got to grow. And so you're going to get to experience this kind of variety when you have a garden, too. And then finally you get to. I call it the economy of the garden. But basically, this idea that you're going to get to eat more parts of the foods that. That you're Eating on, chomping on. So for instance, the kohlrabi, usually kohlrabi from the store is just going to be sold for that little bulb thing at the bottom, that weird kind of alien looking thing. But actually all parts of that plant are edible, including the huge leaves. Grow your own, you get to eat the leaves and the bulb too. Same with say, carrots. When you grow your own, you're going to get these fresh greens that you can make pesto out of, you can make chimichurri out of. You can do all kinds of things with all parts of the plant because you've got them all right there in front of you. So those are just a few ways that the garden provides health to you. Now let's talk about community. So unlike some other hobby hobbies like, I don't know, say my kids watching YouTube, the garden actually connects us with people. I talked about this in the workbook for the first week of our book club and actually have you kind of think through the people that you have learned to garden from, people that you feel connected to because of the garden, and then the people that you want to connect to because of the garden. The garden is actually this way to connect first in our own family unit. So I've had so many moments with my kids, with my husband, where we've been outside together experiencing the garden, experiencing harvesting or planting or working together outside in that space. It's literally a place to pull my family together. It's also a place to meet great people in your own community. So you get connected to the growers, the soil providers, the fertilizer makers, the, the worm compost makers, all the people in your area who are doing great things. The garden connects you to them. It also enables you to make a difference. So you get to do things like support your local economy. You'll end up buying more from the farmer's market. You'll be growing, buying more from farmers. We actually have connected with so many great farmers in Houston because of our work in so many gardens. Then finally you get to literally make a difference in the world. Like you get to do something that typically, typically you'd have to sign up for a non profit or go volunteer, but you're getting to do this in your own space. And that is you're going to reduce your food miles, so that means less fuel usage in your area. And then you're also going to reduce your plastics and your waste. So that's like, it's basically like going and volunteering or giving money to a nonprofit, except you're gardening and making a difference at the same time. Time. Pretty great, right? So those are three aspects. Your health, your experience, and your community. Now, I am going to bring in this fourth unique value, because, you know, I have to, and that is beauty. So this is some of what I got attacked on by these kind of, you know, people who didn't love my book. It's okay. I'm not bitter or anything, but I do want you to think about the beauty of a kitchen garden. Now, people, you know, were appalled at the prices that I quoted for kitchen gardens. But I'd love to know how much those same people spend on other aspects of their home. For instance, how much do they invest in a new piece of furniture, like a dining table or a couch or a bedroom suit? How much would they spend on a home addition like a sun room or a new deck or a workout room or an office? How much would they spend on an entertaining space like a new porch or a new patio or. Or special equipment or things to use to entertain others? And then how much would those people spend on a family play area, like a new game room or a playground or even a swimming pool? I know that not everybody spends thousands of dollars on improvements in their home, but most people do. So if you're a homeowner or even an apartment dweller, oftentimes we're literally spending thousands of dollars a year on the beauty aspects of our home. And yet, for some reason, it's criticized the idea of spending that kind of money on a garden. And I just want to kind of say, why? You know, I mean, to me, I honestly. And if you came to visit my home, you would see this to be true. I actually have spent more money on my garden than I've spent on parts on the inside of my home. In fact, sometimes. Sometimes I have to pause myself and say, okay, don't buy that plant. Go buy a rug so your kids have something soft to sit on. So maybe I just have my priorities a little switched up. But I do have to say that oftentimes I think we balk at pricing for things like this, but it's just because we don't see the value in it. So I like to say to you, to my clients, to everyone considering a garden, that the question really is not do I have enough money for a garden? But instead it's how much am I already spending on all the things that a garden could provide in the areas of experience, health, community, and beauty? So I encourage you today, this is how you're going to Find the money for your garden. You're going to do some math. You're going to figure out how much a garden is actually worth. Because remember, the question is not how much money can I save by gardening? That really is truly. Even for these people who criticize me, I have to say it's the wrong question. The wrong question is, how much money can I save by gardening? The better question is how much is a garden worth to me? So one way to get to that number is do a little math yourself. So could you do this with me? First, write down how much you might be spending this year on home decor and improvements. Now, this was pre Covid. So maybe you're spending less. I mean, this idea. I wrote these questions out pre Covid. Maybe you're spending more. Maybe you're spending less on home. But in a general year, maybe with that's not so crazy, like 2020, would you how much would you spend on home decor and improvements on your home? And then how much do you already spend on entertainment and experiences? How much do you spend on vacations? How much do you spend on classes you attend? Money, memberships, excursions, toys, equipment and more? People complain about the price of the garden, but I haven't seen that many people complain about how much it costs to go to Disney World. I would love to say and suggest that that one trip, I mean, we've never actually been. We never brought my kids to Disney World. So we spent all the money on the garden, obviously. But I know tons of families who. It's like a major, major priority for them to bring their kids to Disney World before a certain age. Well, I've seen the cost for Disney. There's a reason my family hasn't gone. And I'd love to say that you could totally take that money and you could spend it on a garden that you could have for 10 years instead of a Disney trip for 10 days. I'm just saying, I mean, you can take that trip if you want to. Maybe not during COVID but anyway, take up, add up the money you spend on these experiences we talked about that you can have inside the garden. Then how much money do you already spend on your health and nutrition, on gym membership, on studio classes, on buying organic produce and vitamins and supplements and shake powders and all that good stuff? And then how much money or time are you contributing to your community in terms of serving your community, giving back to your community, giving to nonprofits, trying to make a difference in the world and in your area? So add up those numbers just Take a second. You know, obviously not all this is tied to the garden, but I do think it's a great exercise. And no matter a socioeconomic level, I think we can all benefit from this exercise. So add up the amount of money you spend on those four aspects. Okay? Your health, your experiences, your beauty. The beauty that you add to your home, where you live, and to your community. When you add up those numbers, I think you have. I would like to suggest you have the potential value of a garden. What do you think? I think so. But I have to say I'm gonna close with this. Something else is actually going on. When you're worried about the cost of your garden. Are you ready for this? So focusing on the cost of your garden shows that we don't realize something that's really unique about this investment, the investment of a garden. You know what it is? Are you ready? You ready for this? You're already paying for a garden whether you own one or not. Not. You got that? Do you see why? Because unlike other hobbies, other home improvements, exercise activities, and community projects where you could maybe invest or maybe not everybody who's eating food is investing in a garden every single day. It just might not be their own. Do you get that? So we either think we're going to save tons of money, like, this is all about saving money. We have to grow food cheaply, or we're not going to spend money on it at all. But the irony is that we're actually spending lots of money on food every single day from someone else's garden. And here's the deal. When we're buying food that other people grew for us, we're also paying for fuel, because Most of our US food travels at least 1500 miles before it hits our plate. And then we're also paying for packaging. Oh, my goodness. How much packaging do we get rid of every single week from our grocery store food? And then we're also paying for storage. That food that travels across the U.S. it has to get stored on a truck, and then it has to get stored in the grocery store, and then it has to get stored in our refrigerator. So all this marketing, I have to say, it bugs me. All the marketing for gardening that advertises saving tons on money of money on food. Never buy an avocado again. I think it really misses the point because on. Honestly, even if you set up your garden very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very cheaply, like, cheapest way possible, you're still not going to save a ton of money on your food. You really won't. But when you grow your own, however small, however small you want to start, you're going to get so much more value from the money you spent, even if you did it small and simply. So if you think you want a garden but you don't have enough money, then I like to suggest that you ask yourself this question. This is how you get the money for your garden. How much do I already spend on experiences, health and nutrition, home improvement and community service? That's your job for today. How much do I already spend for someone else to garden for me? All right, here's the kicker. Can you add up how much money you spend on plan produce every single week? That's a lot of money for me with my four kids now, I am buying things that obviously I would never grow, I don't think I could ever grow. But there are still things that I do buy that I know I could grow my own if my garden space was big enough. So add up all those numbers and that is how you find the value of the garden and that's how you find the money to make your garden happen. Now, believe it or not, even though in my book I do lay out some pretty pricey gardens, and of course we featured some of the fanciest and nicest gardens that I've gotten to create for Rooted Garden, I will tell you that at the heart I did have in my mind every single one of you that's coming from every single different level of economic ability at the this moment. So I did try to write the book. Even though I lay out the pricing, I did try to write it in a way that you could get started very simply. In fact, in the introduction I say even if all you can start with is a pot of chives, you should absolutely go for it. And I love to highlight some of the less expensive options and ways you can get started, no matter what level is possible for you. So we'll actually have this in the show notes and as part of the blog book club this week is different costs, different ways that you can get in and get set up with a garden simply and quickly, even for a few hundred dollars. So if you've ever gotten to sit in on one of my presentations, I often walk through and show you some of the first kitchen gardens I created with DIY kits and with just building with my hundred dollar garden bed instructions and how we definitely have set up gardens that cost in the hundreds range rather than the thousands. And no matter what way we set them up, I will say I always try to set them up very beautifully, even when they're the simplest possible. So I think that there is always a garden that will work for you, no matter what level you're at economically. And all you gotta do is find the match. But the trick is to start from a different perspective. And that perspective is not, how can I save money by growing a garden, how can I get food cheaply? But instead, how much is the garden worth to me, when you start with that kind of perspective, everything gets cleared up. And when you approach the garden in that way, then you're going to make much better decisions on what you select, because you're seeing it on as a trip to Disney World rather than how can I never buy an avocado again? You know what I'm saying? So, to sum up, this is what we are going to do to find money for our garden. Number one, you're going to add up all the money you're already spending on things that the garden could benefit you in terms of health, in terms of experience, in terms of serving your kids community, and in terms of beauty, of course. So add up all the money you're spending on those particular spots in your life. Then I want to encourage you to consider pausing a few of those things for a few months. So be like me and don't buy your kids that rug to sit on and instead get yourself a garden. Or be like me and skip going to Disney World. Well, especially Skip. Maybe I'm not trying to, you know, harp on Disney, but skip that super expensive vacation and consider pausing some of those things so that you can have space and money to set up your kitchen garden. And the great thing about it is the garden is something that you will have for many, many years to come. The next thing to do is to add up how much you pay for other people's gardens. There's nothing wrong with paying for other people's gardens. I. I do, and I will continue to do it my whole life. The thing I want you to do here is to come to appreciate how much money you're already spending on food, how much money you're spending on a garden even though it's not your own. And then the final step is to decide your garden's value and then go find the money. So taking these numbers into account, decide how much your garden is worth to you, and then find the money, pause those expenses on other things, and then invest in a garden that's going to bring those things to you in a new and different way. That, my friend, is how you can find Money for the garden. This is what you're going to be saying. Instead of saying, I'd love to start a garden, but I don't have the money to make it happen, you're going to be saying, I have all the money I need for my garden garden because it's one of the most valuable things that I own. That's what I've been saying about my garden for many, many years. And I have to say, so many of my clients with rooted garden have said similar things. In fact, one of the first, when I first got started with Rooted garden, I asked one of my first clients to give me a testimony and she wrote me back immediately. And her testimony said, this is one of the best. Best. What did she say? This is one of the. This is the best home improvement project we have ever invested in. It was like she immediately saw what I'm talking about, how valuable the garden is, not just as a place to get food cheaply, but as a home improvement project, as a way to bring new experiences, new beauty, new access to things that build. Build your health and a new way to contribute to your community right outside your back door. That's why I'm so passionate about the kitchen garden, because I really do think it's one of the best investments we can make in ourselves, in our community, and in the world. And it is pretty beautiful to boot. So there's my spiel, there's my defense to that harsh critic who said I was like Gwyneth Paltrow and just creating clickbait. Listen, the kitchen garden is beautiful no matter how you set it up, whether you build it for $30 or $30,000, the garden is gorgeous in its own right. And you have the right to set up your garden however you please. So remember the numbers that we talked about today. Keep in mind 10% of your home's value should be added to your landscape. And then use those numbers and all the other numbers we dove into today to decide how much value value your garden has for you and then go find the money to make it happen. And if you're looking for more money, you could become a garden coach. Just saying. I've funded quite a few of my garden projects in my own yard by helping others learn to garden along the way. So it's a good incentive to get out there and create a business around gardening so that you can buy more gardens, too. All right, thanks so much for listening. Sorry for that little side note there. I'm so thankful for you joining me here on the Grow It Yourself podcast. And making it through week two of the Kitchen Garden Revival Book Club. If you have not signed up yet for the book club, you can do so by taking the quiz@gardenary.com quiz when you take that quiz, you'll immediately get an email with the workbooks attached to them so you can download them, fill them out and follow along with the book club all through the month of August and September. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you next week. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. I hope you loved this episode of Finding Money for the Garden. If you did, please leave a review. That's what that's called. Leave a review for us on itunes, Spotify, our heart radio. Wherever you listen to your podcast, all the reviews matter more than you know. And don't forget, today's episode is brought to you by Garden Coaching. We are here to help you in your own kitchen garden. We'll help you figure out a kitchen garden that matches your budget actually, and design one that fits your needs to bring value to your home. So check us out@gardenary.com coaches where we can help you design a beautiful kitchen garden right away. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next week for week three of Kitchen Garden Revival Book Club. Take care. Bye. Sam.