How to Make Money from Your Garden Without Selling Your Harvest

Did you know you could make a living from your garden and you never, ever once have to sell the harvest? It's true. I'm going to show you in this episode just a few things you can do from your garden in order to make a living. My name is Nicole Burke, and I guess it was over eight years ago. I was looking for a way to make a living from my garden. So because I love, love, love gardening. And I also needed some money. So we have four kids and I had been homeschooling. I decided to not homeschool anymore. And two of my kids went to private school for just one year, and I was on the hook for like 18 grand. I wasn't actually on the hook for it. My husband didn't say so, but I felt on the hook because I was the reason that they were going to that school for a year. So I was looking for a way to make at least $18,000 and do it quickly. But there's a catch. I also wanted to be available to my kids, so I wanted to be able to bring them to school and pick them up from school each and every day. And there's four of them, and one of them was in preschool. So I was looking at a time frame of like 8am to 12pm So I was pretty much asking for the impossible. Like, I wanted to do something meaningful and fun that mattered to me. I needed to make at least $18,000 and. And I needed to do it between the hours of 8 and 12, just on the weekdays. So as you can imagine, my search ended up empty. I tried to find a couple of different jobs. I applied to some things, did some interviews, and nothing was working. So I was like, you know what? If this is going to happen, I'm going to have to make it happen myself. And that's when I started looking for entrepreneurial opportunities. I started thinking, what kind of business can I create? What can I sell? What can I do? What service can I provide so that I can make this money that we need that's beyond our normal family budget and do it within a time frame that works for me. So I started considering all these different skill sets and things that I had, and I couldn't help but keep coming back to the garden. I loved gardening. Gardening was my getaway. Gardening had helped me survive homeschooling and being home with my four kids during those years when my career was paused. And I just loved it. And more than that, I believed in it. I truly thought and still think that the world would be such a better place if everybody had a garden. And so I was like, man, I love this. It's fun for me. I'm pretty good at it. And at least sort of good at it. Good enough at it. And I also really believe in it. I believe in the mission, I believe in the purpose. I believe in the benefits. And so I started searching for ways I could turn it into a business. Well, you know, I went to this thing, may have heard of it, called Google. And I typed in, how do I make a living as a gardener? Well, Google gave me lots of crazy ideas. One was to plant up my entire yard with garlic. It talked about how garlic sells pretty good price for the pound, how garlic isn't too hard to tend. You just put it in the ground and let it do its thing, you know, six, nine months later, take it out, boom, you can make some money. The article actually promised you could make like 40k selling garlic. But I was thinking, my yard is not that big, and that's gonna look pretty. Pretty funny if it's completely covered in garlic. I don't even know if, like, my HOA will let me do that. Fun idea. Not sure I could execute it, but it was intriguing nonetheless. I thought, oh, 40K, you know, that would give me. That would pay for the private school. Other options were to make plants. So there was this guy, super cool guy, and he had this way of taking perennial plants and rooting cuttings and then growing those out to be large plants and then basically creating your own backyard nursery. And think. In fact, I think that's what his company was called or is backyard nursery or something. Anyway, I was intrigued. I watched a lot of videos and I was like, okay, maybe I could do this. And then I realized, you know what, I'm a mom. I've got four kids. I'm barely, like, keeping up with the laundry. I don't know if I could grow a nursery that seems like I'm going from four babies to 400 babies. And probably not the best idea. I did try my hand at a few of plants, though, propagating them, and it was super fun, but definitely not the thing that was going to be my career. I looked into a couple of other options. There were things about planting, you know, doing permaculture and fruit forests, food forests, and planting my yard up with fruit trees and perennials. Things that I could get lots of produce from that that would sell for a good price. But that involved me waiting for years to get the produce and then spending the weekends at the farmer's market trying to get people to buy the food that I'd grown. And I frequented the farmer's market a lot, and I saw lots of farmers, unfortunately, leaving the markets almost every week with trucks still full of all that delicious food that people should have come to buy, but they didn't. All that to say Google disappointed. It didn't come up with a solution that I needed. So I thought, well, you know, one thing I do grow a lot of that's pretty easy to take care of is lettuce. And so that was my first idea. I'll just sell lettuce. Lettuce sells for a high price for a very low volume. And I know from my own experience that I can get a ton of lettuce out of a very small space. So my husband, wise as he is, was like, great, let's test it out. Why don't you harvest and package, I don't know, 10 packages, and I'll bring them to work and sell them for you. So he worked at MD Anderson at the time, had lots of people interested in healthy food. And I was like, sure thing. So that night, I harvested tons of lettuce, washed it, bagged it, and it only took 10 bags for me to talk myself out of that particular idea. I was like, I can see me doing this at scale in my kitchen and with my current resources, and I'm not sure it's the best use of my time and my abilities to, you know, be washing lettuce. And so it was from there that I started to have a conversation with one of my friends, Teresa. She was homeschooling with me, but she'd been running a business while she homeschooled. So naturally, she was my girl to call for advice. I was like, look, I need a business. I got to have a way to pay for my kids to go to private school for a year. And I want it to be about the garden. What do you think of this idea? I'm going to sell a bunch of lettuce. And she interrupts me. She says, nicole, you know, it's not the lettuce I want from you or the garlic or the fruit or the plants. I want to know how you garden. I want you to teach me how you do what you do. I'm thinking something like garden consulting. She said those words, and it was a light bulb moment for me. I was like, oh, my goodness, I love this idea. Instead of me selling my harvest, instead of me selling stuff from my garden, I could sell my knowledge of the garden. I could sell my service of information. And advice that felt so much simpler, so much more inspiring, and so much more of what I wanted to be about was enabling other people to do what I had done, not just giving them what I had produced. So that set me on the path of becoming a garden consultant and changed my life forever. And I've never, ever, ever had to sell one single harvest. Over an eight year period, my garden consulting company has grossed more than $4 million. And it's all from garden consulting and services and products that are sold as part of the garden consulting system. So I want to teach you a few things that you can sell as a gardener that don't have anything to do with harvest. We're not talking about filling up your yard with garlic or growing a bunch of fruit trees or even a big old bed of lettuce. We're talking about growing a garden business by garden consulting. So here's the first step to make a living from your garden without selling your harvest. And that's to document your garden may seem like, you know what, Take pictures and videos. That's how I'm going to make a living. That's the start of it. So the first step of becoming a great consultant is studying yourself, watching and observing the lessons from your own garden so that you can take those and give them in a systemized way to your clients and students. So that's step one. Document. And believe it or not, eventually you could sell the documentation. I mean, how valuable to say, here's what my garden looks like in this city, in town from January to December. Take it. Sell the documentation so that you can inspire other people to have that same kind of success inside their own garden as well. The next way that you can make a living from your garden is to teach workshops. So workshops would be paid for times where you get to join groups of people who want to learn a specific skill from you. And they're going to walk away with something in hand that signifies and shows them how to take that first step. So you could teach a workshop all about growing tomatoes. And the walk off product from that workshop could be a potted tomato plant. You could teach a workshop all about growing salad. Hey, sounds like a good idea. And the thing they walk away with is a fully planted out container full of salad garden seeds. You can make the workshop whatever you want it to be, but you're going to take the lessons you learned from your documentation and turn it into like a three to five step workshop where you teach what you've learned from your own garden experience. And then you help People walk away with a very small part, a very small. Like a example of what they're going to do on a bigger scale in their own space. So you document your garden. You can sell workshops. Workshops can go for $30, $50, $150. I've been to some workshops that were over $200 in order to have time with the instructor and the ability to make a certain sample of that, that thing that they teach together. So lots of opportunity and potential for making a living just from doing gardening workshops. The next thing you can offer is the simplest and the most powerful, and that's a garden consultation. So the consultation is simply where you head out to meet with your client. You let them tell you all their desires about their own garden. You look at their space, you observe their space, and then you tell them about your system. So these are all the things you've observed from your own garden, the things you've documented that you know what works, and you're going to teach them that system so they can use that same system in their own garden. You give them recommendations, and if you want to take it even further, you give them a proposed design and plan that they can implement in their own garden space. Garden consultations to start around a hundred dollars, and then they can go up from there, depending on your skill level and what you're going to offer them after the consultation. Another thing that you can sell to make a living as a gardener without selling your harvest is to sell products and services that go along with your consultation. So this happened naturally for me. I would be on a consult, I would tell the person, do this, use these raised beds, do this kind of trellis, use these kind of plants. And they would look at me and say, can you get those for me? And I'm like, well, I guess I can. And this just naturally flows from the consultation. So you go and you meet with your client, you tell them what to do, and then they're like, well, can you just go get those things for me? Because it's a lot of work to find those things and make sure I'm buying the right thing. So you can find products and offer services to your clients right after the consultation, and you can charge exactly what that thing costs. So plus a markup, or once you really get your business set up and running, you'll be able to purchase those things at a wholesale price. And then you can, you can charge just the retail price straight to your client. So in that case, you're not just making money on the consultation, you're Also making a little bit of markup on all the products that you provided for them. And you've given them the peace of mind that they bought the exact right thing, which feels so, so very good. The last thing that you can do to make money, well, there's so many more things, but the last thing in this list that you can do to make a living as a gardener without selling your harvest is creating a membership. So this membership is a way for you to teach a group of people over a longer period of time. So it's similar to a workshop, but it's much more powerful because you're going to have this sustained way of getting to meet with your students over and over and over again, over one season, over the entirety of one year, or even over the span of several years. One of the wonderful things about growing a garden is that it's very community oriented. The garden almost just requires that we do the work as a community. And when you create a garden membership, you're creating that community for all the people who want to learn how to garden and your town or city, you allow them not just to learn from you, but also to learn from one another. So you can conduct this membership online, or you can do it in person, where you meet together once a week, once a month, once a quarter, to go over the new lessons you've documented from your own garden and to talk about the challenges and the projects that you'll all be taking on in the month ahead. So this is a really powerful way to help people not just start a garden, but never stop gardening. So you've set them up through a workshop or through a consultation. You've sold them some products and some services. Now you're able to give them a membership, a way that you can stay in touch with them, you can keep encouraging them, and you can continue to tell them what they need to do and not do each and every month thereafter. So there you have it. Those are the things that you can do to make a living as a garden consultant. And you never, ever have to sell one of your harvests. First, you can document your garden, teach from your garden. Let your garden, let the things that you're growing be the basis for how you're going to teach your clients and students. Next, hold a workshop. Next, you can do some private consultations. Next up, sell some products and services that help your client take your consult to the next level. And then finally, create a garden membership where people who've learned from you in other areas and aspects now get to come all together and learn from you and grow together as a community. I'm not just pulling these things out of my hat. These are actually all services and products that I've personally charged for over the years and that I've helped over a thousand gardeners charge for as Gardenary consultants. I didn't just grow a business myself, I've helped hundreds of gardeners grow similar businesses or all around the world. So if you love this episode, if you love this idea, then you gotta check out Gardenary Certification program. You can find out about it@gardenary.com and you can also search for Gardenary's Consultant certification to find out more and to apply and see if this program is a good fit for you. Whatever you do, don't hold back. If you know how to garden, if you love the garden, if you believe in the garden the way that I did eight years ago, then you should start charging for your gardening advice and learning how to make a living from this thing that you love. Each and every time someone pays you to be their garden consultant, they're going to pay so much more attention to their garden. This is a way for them to signify to themselves that they're taking their garden seriously and they're ready to learn to garden just the way that you do. Thanks so much for listening and watching the Grow youw Self podcast. I cannot wait to inspire you and show you what to do next time. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. You can keep listening anywhere. You love getting your podcast delivered on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, iHeartRadio, you name it, we are there for you. And if you want to read the notes and get our free resources to help you grow more, you can go to gardenary. Com Podcast.