What Kitchen Gardens and Yoga Pants Have in Common

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. From 2012 to 2016, the number of Americans practicing yoga grew by 50% in just four years. And it's this fact that brings me to my point for today's episode, which is kitchen gardens need to become like yoga pants. What? Yoga pants. Kitchen gardens. You don't get it. You're gonna get it after today's episode. Today we are kicking off the Kitchen Garden Revival Book Club. It's been a long time in the making, but it is here. All of August and September, we will be diving into every single section of the Kitchen Garden Revival book together. And today we're kicking off the party, talking about the introduction, the preface. I'm bringing you behind the scenes of why I wrote what I wrote and guiding you through and every section. So grab your book if you haven't already. You can get yours@gardenary.com book and let's do this. Let's do the Garden Book Club together right here on the podcast. Sound good? Today's episode is brought to you by my Green Thumb Quiz. We set up the Gardenary Green Thumb Quiz to ask you a number of questions to kind of help you figure out where you are on your garden journey right now and to give you free resources to help you grow to the next level. You can check it out@gardenary.com quiz. Now let's dive in to today's episode, why Kitchen Gardens Equals Yoga Pants. Or it will very soon. Let's do it. It's episode 30, and I cannot wait to grow with you today. Welcome back to the Grow youw Self podcast. Thank you so much for being here with me for so many episodes. We are on episode 30. What in the world? 30 episodes? That's crazy. That also means we are 30 weeks into past, 30 weeks into 2020. And oh my goodness, what a year it has been. Now, let me give you a little background here. My book was spread, supposed to come out April 14, 2020, that got delayed because of COVID At that time, the delay was on the China side because that's where the books were being printed. Then we delayed it to April 21st. Then the date became April 28th. Then the date became May 5th. Well, I woke up May 5th, the morning of May 5th, super excited, ready to talk about my book, to start. Start a book club to just do YouTube lives. And all these exciting plans I had for the month of May, only to open my phone and see on Amazon that my book was sold out. So then I checked Target and my book was sold out there. And then I checked Barnes and Noble and the book was sold out there, too. So suddenly I felt very, let's just say, dismayed, disappointed, saddened. The book I'd worked for over a year on was not available for anyone. So it was all in back order. And I think the new date was like May 27th. So it felt wrong to really push and promote and do a lot of activities around Kitchen Garden Revival when most people couldn't get their copy. And lots of people were pretty frustrated because they had ordered them even before the book had come out. So finally got the books out, I want to say. Around end of May, things started shipping and I was just about to kick off a big thing for Kitchen Garden Revival in the month of June called the Grow Yourself Challenge. And then I'm so sad to say that George Floyd was killed. And that whole horrible. I can't think of words, but we all woke up to the very horrible truths about what was happening to our black sisters and brothers. And honestly, it just felt really strange and not right to be launching a book and celebrating a book, even though it's about a thing that pulls us all together. It just didn't feel. It didn't feel like the right timing. So I paused everything in June, the first week of June, as we all did, just kind of started listening a little bit better and paying attention and working through the changes that need to happen in the US in regards to equality for our black brothers and sisters. So that is still very much a work that I am undergoing with gardenary and lots of new initiatives that are coming your way, but they're slow in the making because I'm trying to do them the right way. Not by leading, but by listening. So, anyway, all that to say, I paused everything. So this book I'd worked on pretty much all of 2019, I just honestly have felt a little. I mean, I'm sure we've all had. In the grand scheme of things, I know this is not a big thing and other people have experienced such bigger losses in regards to Covid and Black Lives Matter. But for me personally, Brene Brown likes to say that I think I've learned from her that it's okay to have your own sadness, right? It doesn't belittle other people's or mean that yours is more important. It's just. It's okay. So for me, it was a sadness to lose the time and the celebration. I had a huge book tour planned in like 10 cities and was going to get to meet up with so many of you, and it all just. It was just over. So here is my attempt, my second, third attempt. Take this as a business lesson from me, if you follow me for business advice and guidance, is to just keep trying. So I tried. I was going to do this in April and May, and then I was going to do this in June. And now here we are in August. Let me tell you what we're gonna do. We are gonna celebrate the Kitchen Garden together. We're gonna celebrate all of the things you've done in the garden. We're gonna be learning. I'm gonna be bringing you behind the scenes of every single section of the book in ways that you'd never be able to get off the page. And we're gonna have so many different ways to interact. So there'll be YouTube lives, there will be blog posts, there'll be things on Instagram, there'll be interviews. And over the next two months here on the Grow youw Self podcast, we're gonna be deep diving, and I'm talking deep into each and every section of the book. So I'm going to be telling you the backstories, why I wrote what I wrote, and even portions that got cut from the book. So it's going to be super fun. Tons of behind the scenes and Eric Kelly, I have to tell you, he's the most incredible photographer and he took probably 8,000 photos for me for the book. So, so many photos have never been seen and I'm going to be posting those. And just each week as we go through each chapter, you're going to get to see so much that you haven't gotten to see yet. So all that to say if you don't have the book yet, hello, go get it. You finally can. We are on the second printing. Thank you so much for all your orders. And you can get it@gardenary.com book and you can find out more about registering to get the emails and all the behind the scenes stuff of what's going on@gardenary.com book club. We'll also have the book club registration, of course, on the book page. All right. Was that enough background? I hope it's not too much, but I just had to kind of fill you in. I want to say somewhere in the middle of the summer I almost was like, whatever, I give up. This book just didn't. It just wasn't meant to be. But I'm not a quitter, okay? And you shouldn't be a quitter either. All right, today we're going to talk about the introduction and the preface. It's going to be so fun because I'm going to tell you why I wrote what I wrote. So you're going to get to kind of get inside my brain and understand why the words are there. So first I want to talk about yoga pants though, as I mentioned in the introduction. So I did this, it was probably 2018, I did this workshop for the Garden Club of Houston. Wonderful group of women, one of the first to give me a chance to speak to them. And I spoke about salad gardening. And the title of my talk was why Salad Gardening Should Be like Yoga Pants. And I'm going to tell you why I still talk about this all the time. I got to talk with Kevin at Epic Gardening about this as well. So here's the deal, okay? Yoga is an old, old, old practice, right? It has been around for thousands of years. It is a Hindu spiritual practice, but it has this mix. It's a really neat mix. It's spiritual, it's physical and it's mental. It's. It's all three of those things tied together. It's defined. I pulled it up, of course, on Google. It's a Hindu spiritual and ascetic discipline, a part of which, including breath control, simple meditation and the adoption of specific bodily postures, widely Practiced for health and relaxation. Okay, so that's yoga been around for thousands of years, mostly centered in Asian culture. So obviously started in India and. Or in that the Hindu. But anyway, in that area of the world and then has slowly spread. Now here's the deal though. All right, are you ready for this? Here's what happened. So in the US it was like kind of just slow growing. So in the 80s, there began to be more people practicing yoga, but before that it was kind of woo woo. Like it wasn't widely accepted, Definitely not mainstream. So if you had walked up to me in yoga pants or done it, you know, a tree pose or, you know, a downward dog or something in the 80s, most people would have looked at you weird because most people were working out to Jane Fonda, you know, with like leg warmers on and stuff. If you aren't from the 80s, please go Google Jane Fonda and leg warmers. And you can thank me later because my sister and I, we used to work out to Jane Fonda. It was a thing. So. So yoga was kind of, you know, off. It was. It was definitely in the outskirts of acceptable, normal people exercises. I'm going somewhere with this, trust me. All right, so I'll try to get there faster. So here's what happened. 80s still kind of out there. Definitely marginalized type of exercise for the US and then kind of died down in the 90s. I don't remember anyone talking about yoga at all in the 90s. And I was super cool, so I definitely knew everything that was trending. And then in 2000, it began to make a comeback. And then as I read to you, the statistic from 2012 to 2016, the number of Americans doing yoga grew by 50%. What? That is craziness. 50%. So what happened? Well, let me tell you about a little company you may have heard of. Not sure Lululemon ever heard of them. So if you haven't listened to the How I Built this podcast, I love that podcast. I listened to it ever since I became an entrepreneur. There's a great episode. It's actually very sad the way it ends, but the start of Lululemon is fascinating. So since you're a podcast listener, hello, thank you for listening. Check out How I Built this if you enjoy entrepreneur stories. So Lululemon started in 1998 and created yoga pants for a simple item for women to wear at the stitch studio. So 1998. All right, so this is basically right before 2000. Yeah, that year. That's two years before that. In case you Couldn't do the math. Sorry about that. Didn't mean to insult your intelligence. So kind of slow growing. If you listen to the story of Lululemon, just kind of slow growth. And then I was reading this Bloomberg article, I'll link to it in the show notes. Two decades later, they literally have conquered the closet. And this an article, I think, from 2018. And I hear now that Covid is here, basically everybody's living in Lululemon. They're like, their stock is way up. So if I'm right, hopefully I haven't like fact checked that. I just. My husband tells me these things. So 2014, this Bloomberg article says teenagers began to prefer leggings over jeans. Then people started wearing athletic clothing for athleisure, but it's mostly just yoga pants to run errands. And now they're wearing yoga pants to the office. U.S. imports of women's elastic knit pants last year surpassed those of jeans for the first time ever, according to the U.S. census Bureau. What was once a simple stretchy legging, it seems, has become an engineering marvel. Are you ready for this? When you realize, not too surprising when you realize that $48 billion is spent every year on activewear in the United States. Yep, that's what happened. So do you get the numbers? Do you see the tie over there? You see it? 2014 is when teenagers began to prefer leggings over jeans. Everyone started wearing yoga pants everywhere, to the office to run errands, etc. And during that time, the US yoga practitioners, people who actually were doing yoga, grew by 50% to the point that now they say about 36 million people in the United States regularly practice yoga, up from about 16 million eight years ago. All right, so this is why kitchen gardens equals yoga pants. Do you get it? So yoga pants normalized yoga, okay? Before yoga was off the beaten path, it was kind of strange. It was different. It was kind of woo woo. And then yoga pants came in. And suddenly people, it became normal to wear yoga pants. I mean, I remember asking my friend Allison, we were at the park, and it was right around this time, it was probably 2014. And I was like, when did it become okay to show your rear end like that? Like what? Because people were just walking around with tight yoga pants on. And I just couldn't. I could not adjust. And at that time, of course, I owned zero pairs of yoga pants. And now I own a lot, like six or seven. So what happened with the yoga pants is that first people just bought them. It was just something very simple and Accessible. And people saw other people doing it. And we had this crowd factor happen, right? Where people just picked up the habit and started buying yoga pants, realized they were very comfortable, and they maybe liked the way they looked in them. And then they suddenly were like, huh, I have these yoga pants. Maybe I should do some yoga. Huh? That's a weird thought. And all of a sudden, we don't just have all these people wearing yoga pants. We also have all these new people practicing yoga. All right, super long explanation there to tell you that that is my vision for kitchen gardens. This was literally the speech I gave in that workshop to the Garden Club of Houston. I will be giving this talk for a long time until kitchen gardens become yoga pants. So I'm gonna explain to you at the end how I think these two things tie together, but just kind of hold that of how yoga pants normalized yoga and how kitchen gardens are gonna do that for gardening. All right, here we go. So we're gonna now dive into my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, and do this book club thing with the idea of yoga pants on. By the way, if you have yoga pants on while you're listening to this, you get bonus points. Cause that is just so impressive. All right, so first of all, I have to say, if you open the book, you'll see that the dedication is to my husband, Jason. It says for who built our first kitchen garden. So I just had to start and say that he is the main reason why I've had so much success. I've fought for it for sure and worked super hard. But Jason is a researcher, and he is actually a chemist. He's an organic chemist, and he loves gathering information. If you guys do the Enneagram, Jason is a five, and I'm a three. By the way, I'm not just giving away his number and not mine. So he's a five. A five is someone who. Who loves gathering data. And Jason has served me in so many ways because he did that. So when we first started gardening in Nashville, he gathered tons of information. He was the one who first tried the raised bed. If you haven't listened to the girl who built gardens or who planted gardens, I'll link up that in the show notes. That was one of our previous episodes that brings you through our garden journey. So he researched there, and then when we moved to Houston, he literally. He bought the Urban harvest book there. And Houston, he built our raised beds. He researched where we should do soil, how to get the plants. He is all that research. He just set it up, set me up. For success. So I love him. He puts up with my craziness. We are like. We are such different personalities. He's super organized and clean. I mean, I'm clean. I just took a shower, actually, but you know what I mean. He loves order and tidiness. And I am a creative artist with tons of new ideas every day, so you can imagine the way those things go together. But I actually took it out. Well, I'm not gonna tell you, but I had a little snarky thing in my dedication. I took it out because he has been patient with me, because he kind of had the idea to start the garden, and then I took it over. So anyway, Jason, I love you. I know you're not listening to this, but just so everyone else knows, I do love you. And thank you for building me a kitchen garden. Okay, enough of this sappiness, guys. Tell the people you love that you love them every day. Tell them. Give them a hug. Especially during this time, we got to encourage each other and hug on each other. Especially the people you can hug, because we can't hug so many other people. Right? All right, let's talk about the preface. So the preface starts. It's just two pages, and it says a few things will happen before you finish reading this book. So I'm going to tell you why I wrote what I wrote here in the preface. I've been learning. I've learned since I. I don't know, maybe from the beginning. I grew up in. I grew up in the church, and faith is a word that we used a ton growing up. Faith and belief. And so. And then as I entered business, I learned this term called future pacing. Future pacing is where you. You're helping your client or your customer or your audience to envision themselves in a new way. And this is what I wrote. This is how I wrote the preface. So I wrote the preface with a future pacing idea, a faith idea, a belief idea. So what I'm trying to do on these two pages is give you belief, give you faith, make you think that you're not just going to read these words, but you're actually going to change as a result of reading the book that you'll actually finish and be a new kind of person, a better kind of person. A person with new thoughts, new experiences, new lessons, even new identity. So, yeah. So the preface. Read it again. And think of the idea of future pacing. So I went through five points in my future pacing just on these two pages, and here they are. So the first future pacing I tried to give you is your own personal identity. It's the very first paragraph, or I guess the second paragraph. And I tried to give you, convince you that you should add a new title to yourself when you define yourself. And that title, of course, is gardener. So I say very first sentence first. If you don't already, you'll start calling yourself a gardener. So many reasons why we as adults don't try new things. Why we don't go for things that we want to do is because we fear failure. We fear embarrassment and shame. We don't like it when we try something and it doesn't work. My kids say this all the time. I'll say, why don't you try tumbling? Why don't you do this? And they'll say, well, I'm not good at it. I'm like, well, of course you're not good at it. I mean, you didn't. You weren't born good at walking, right? You fell down a thousand times, and then you were good at walking. And as adults, we forget this. We forgot how we started walking, right? We forget that it makes sense when we watch our kids that of course they're not good at something right away. But oftentimes, for people who are interested in gardening, they don't want to try if they're not going to be good at it. And so to me, the title of gardener means you're trying. You're trying to grow things. It doesn't mean that you successfully grow things even yet. It just means you're trying. That's what I'm trying to do here in this first paragraph. So I'm trying to just let you take on the title of I am a gardener. So if you haven't already, I'd love for you to take the challenge and add gardener to your profile. If you're listening to this and you have an Instagram profile, a YouTube, a TikTok, Facebook, whatever, you know, people always say, coffee lover, mom, dog mom, you know, engineer, whatever. You know, add gardener in there. That really is my vision. So we'll be walking through this inside the book club this week of adding gardener to your profile, because I just think once you can shift your identity in that way and call yourself a gardener, then you'll just start living it out. Our brains, they kind of get in ruts, right? So our brains, they don't like to make decisions or do new things unless it feels safe. And so one of the ways we can do that for our brain is just tell our brain, hey, it's safe to try some gardening. It's okay if we fail because we're gardeners, and gardeners try growing things. So that's the first future pacing. Is your identity shift, shifting who you see yourself as being and seeing yourself as a gardener? I think this is one of the most important, probably this paragraph may be one of the most important paragraphs of the whole book. And my vision is that everyone would see themselves as a gardener, whether they're a child, an older person, a younger person, everything in between, that all of us as humans would see ourselves as gardeners. That really is my vision by the time my youngest is grown in about 10 years, that it would be very, very commonplace for everyone to have the word gardener in their bio. Alright, the second future pacing is your space. So reimagining your space. So in this paragraph, I'm trying to get you to visualize, to get a picture in your head, a Pinterest board, if you will, of what it could look like to actually have a kitchen garden, to have a place in your home, in your yard that you literally call the kitchen garden. So I try to make it common. I say, you know, just like you have your driveway and your office and your kitchen, you also have your kitchen garden. So I'm trying to get you to feel like it's normal to say, hey, can you go out to the kitchen garden and pick me some chives? The third future pacing I am trying to do is gratitude. So my third paragraph in the future pacing is me helping you appreciate what you already have. I don't know if you have studied gratitude, the idea of saying thanks, and how powerful it is. I did a challenge. Oh, gosh. It was right around the time I started gardening, actually 2010, 2011. I got this from Ann Voskamp. She wrote a book called 1000 Gifts, I think. Anyway, the challenge was to write down a thousand things you're thankful for in a year. And I did it. And it was so powerful to notice the very little things. Since then, I've learned, obviously everyone likes to talk about gratitude. I mean, I can remember doing a gratitude journal with Oprah. Well, not everybody likes to talk about gratitude. I should put that, I would say successful people who are happy like to talk about gratitude. But even now I practice this with my business and my growth. It is saying thank you and being thankful for every little thing that happens. And I think I heard recently, actually gratitude is being satisfied, is assuming you already have these things. And so I'm trying to make you grateful for what you got. So I say, you're not just Gonna have a new bio and a new happy place. You'll also gain a bigger appreciation for the place you call home. The unique aspects of your community, your seasons and your. We will give you a greater appreciation for what your little plot of Earth can do. You'll see how your seasons are distinct and different. And all these things will make your town, your city, your community, not just a place where you live, but a spot on Earth you belong to. And yeah. So I'm trying to make you grateful. Be grateful. Okay? If you haven't taken the challenge of writing down things you're thankful for every day, I highly recommend it. But especially during this time. Oh, my goodness. Such good therapy to just be grateful and celebrate the small things. All right, that is the third thing I did for future pacing in the preface, and the fourth thing I did is magic. So I'm trying to get you to believe in magic here because you are going to experience some amazing magic in your garden. I am all about bringing back the magic to everyday life. I think that's one of the things we're all craving. I think that's why we love surfing social media and YouTube and TikTok and Instagram. I think we're all looking, we're all dying for a little bit of magic. The Harry Potter series, if that did not bring out our desire for magic, I don't know what else did. So I'm trying to show you that there is magic in the dirt. Literally, like the seeds and the soil have the magic show that you are looking for. In fact, I did a whole challenge in January called Make Garden Magic. Maybe I'll bring that back again. We'll have to do that maybe in the fall or something. But I'm trying to help you see that magic is not, you know, social media is fun and all, but that the real magic is literally watching a seed turn into fish. So this is what I said. After you watch a tiny seed become a huge basket full of delicious salad, or a little plant become a giant bowl of soup, you won't be able to unsee it, and you won't want to. A carrot is about to become a unicorn to you, and it's the very best feeling. I actually got an email from one of the readers, and she said, oh, my gosh, I just pulled my first unicorn. It was so awesome. All right, that's the fourth thing for future pacing. And then. And the fifth thing for future pacing is mission. So I learned this. Well, this probably goes back to my church roots of growing up. This idea of Having a purpose that's bigger than yourself. And I've been learning this from the beginning with my business as well. Yeah. What happened When I first started Rooted Garden, I had a mission. My mission was to start 100 new gardens in Houston, Texas that year. And that was my mission. And I shared it, like, in my very first email. That was what I said. I have a mission to set up 100 new gardens in our city this year. And my mission has just grown and grown in new ways now. My mission is to help a thousand gardeners start their own gardening profession around the world. So having a mission, having something bigger. I don't know if you've ever signed on to something like this, this idea of, of joining in something that's bigger than yourself, that's bigger than your own company could accomplish, your own family could accomplish, and the power that comes from that. I think we all as humans are longing for this, some way to join up in something that's meaningful and purposeful and makes our life, our everyday life, feel like it has more significance. And having a mission definitely does that. I know for me, having a mission for my business, for myself, for my family gets me up in the morning. It helps me through the depressing days and the challenging times. So that's what I'm doing in the fifth paragraph. Future pacing is, I am trying to get you to join this mission. So I say this book will help you see that you're a change maker, part of something bigger, someone doing real good in the world from now on. When you hear talk of global warming or ice caps melting or food miles, when the news talks about local economic challenges or lack of natural resources, you'll know that you're doing your part to help and learning to do more. You've got a tangible, doable plan right in front of you to start making change today. So that's what the fifth paragraph is all about, is making change. So that's my preface. What do you guys think? Yeah, so I did some serious future pacing there. So first it's for you to take on the new identity, to call yourself a gardener. Second is for you to actually picture in your mind, or maybe on a Pinterest board or somewhere, that you actually have a space in your yard that's called a kitchen garden. The third is to have gratitude, to love what you have already, to appreciate it, to love what, what your home is like, what location you're in, where you live, and then, and then the fourth is to see the magic in everyday things and to suddenly have a Magic show out in front of you. I'm trying to get you excited about what's happening right outside your back door. And lastly, the future pacing I'm trying to give you is a mission to join me in something that's much bigger than ourselves, something that's much beyond what we as individuals can do and give you a reason to get up in the morning and to keep going because you're doing something that makes a difference in the whole world. All right, what do you guys think? Future pacing. Like it. Now, the way I end the preface is I say, so now that you know how this story will end. And that is an important thing I want to say about the way I wrote this book. It was definitely, I tried to write it. Even though it is very instructional, I tried to write it as much as possible as a story I read somewhere else. See if I can find the link. I was googling gardening books as I was getting set up to write Kitchen Garden Revival. And one thing I read, it was horrible on these reviews of gardening books, it said, the problem with most gardening books is they're written by gardeners. And I was like, oh, ouch. So I took it as a warning basically to not write this book as like an encyclopedia, but to write it more in story format. So I did try to write it as a story as much as possible and give you my own little personal stories along the way, which we'll dive into as we go through the book club. All right, so that's the preface. Now let's talk about the introduction, and then we will close up this first section of the Kitchen Garden Revival Book Club session number one. All right, so in the introduction, I define what a kitchen garden is. A kitchen garden is not a garden inside the kitchen. I get so many people asking me that, so does this mean you're growing food inside the kitchen? I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, it doesn't. It means we're growing food for the kitchen. So I give a little bit of background about kitchen gardens, and one of the reasons I do this is to show that it's not a new concept. So oftentimes, I think what we forget when we are always trying to come up with something new and novel is that really there are very few. There really aren't any new ideas, right? Or new things in the world. There's new framing. There's new ways you can look at things. And I think what's funny is oftentimes we feel like we're always looking for something new. But I do Think there's a deep longing in all of us to return, to return to our roots, for lack of a better word, to return to things how they were, or to return to how our family has done things. When I lived in China and we would travel to villages, it was really interesting. One of the key aspects of these minority cultures that we would visit with was just all the photos of their ancestors, and they would line the. What's that called? The thing above the fire. They had, like, an altar, basically, to them, you know, like, their life was centered around what had been and what their people had gone through and worked through. And so. And it's interesting to me, I think we're in our culture, especially in American culture, we're very forward, progress and pushing forward. But I think there is this thing inside of all of us that actually, in some ways, really wants that tie back to who we were, who our people were, who our grandparents were, and our great grandparents. And I think the garden does that. So I've actually heard this from a lot of my community, is they'll reach out to me and they'll say, you know, my grandmother died, my mother died, my grandfather. And they're telling me about someone who's passed or someone who has gone before them. And they literally say, when I'm in the garden, I feel connected to them. I feel like I'm with them. And for me, my grandfather was the professor. Yeah. The head of horticulture at Mississippi State. My aunts and my mom always tell me what you're doing. You are literally, you know, your pawpaw would be so thrilled to see what you're doing. So, anyway, so in the introduction, what I'm trying to do basically, is show you that even though this is a new approach to the garden, like, I am going to teach you some things that I do think I've literally created as new and novel, that really we are tying back to what our people have done for thousands of years, that we are just. We're reconnecting to something that's been part of human culture forever, like, since the beginning. Well, since, you know, I don't know, they came out of the cave and started planting stuff. So then I try to. So I'm connecting you to your history, and then I am doing my best at the next point to mainstream garden. So, gardening. So this is where the yoga pants come in. So to me, kitchen gardening gardens are the yoga pants of gardening in the sense that kitchen gardens are one of the simplest, easiest ways to get started growing. Growing your own food. And they're beautiful. They're very Instagram worthy. They're very Instagramable. They're very, like, aesthetically pleasing. And it's like, definitely an image thing. I mean, I got attacked by reviewers about my book because they're like, oh, this is just clickbait. She's just creating this to look like Gwyneth Paltrow, et cetera. So, you know, like, there's that side of it where it is very beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. And that is. That is. There's a reason for that. So I see the kitchen garden and its Instagramableness as, you know, a way to mainstream something that's so beautiful and. And neat and essential to our everyday life. So I try to do that. In just a few paragraphs, I talk about how a kitchen garden is not a homestead. It's not a vegetable patch. It's not a rambling field. It's not a ton of hard work. It doesn't take a ton of space, and you can get started in one of the simplest ways. So I am literally trying to be like, take all your objections and fight them. So I'm like, not a ton of time, not a ton of space, not a lot of hard work. Any objection that you, as the reader might be going, okay, yeah, that's good for her, but this won't work for me. I'm doing my best in the introduction to convince you otherwise. And then, of course, I am trying to appeal to the Gwyneth Paltrow and you or the Oprah Winfrey or whoever is reading that has this vision of we like to be pretty and we like pretty things. I mean, there's a reason why people love Lululemon leggings. Like, they're really nice, they're pretty, and they make you feel good. And I'm talking about that, too, that in this book, we are going to definitely be diving into style and design and aesthetics because we have eyes, right? I mean, it's just part of human nature to love beauty. And the garden is definitely something that's beautiful by nature. But we get to kick it up a notch with the kitchen garden. All right, so I try to basically mainstream the garden. I'm trying to show you that kitchen gardens are like yoga pants. I am showing you all the different designs and sizes and how you can definitely get one that fits you. All right? And then I finish up the introduction with my why. So why kitchen garden? And this is how I basically close up the introduction before we jump into chapter one. I don't know if you have heard the famous YouTube. I mean, it's a famous TED talk by Simon Sinek. It's called. Is it called Know youw why? I think it's called Know youw why. He has a book about it too. I'm so sorry if I mispronounced the title. I watched that TED talk several times. So incredible. And his book is incredible too. He actually has a new press called Optimism Press. And he. One of his first books was with Submarine Oak. My friend who reviewed my book for me, she's with Homestead, Brooklyn, so I'll link to her as well. Here. Simon Sinek talks about how people don't buy your what, they buy your why. And that why is really the most important question you can answer for anything. And so I dive into the why in the introduction. I'm still trying to convince you that you gotta buy this book or read this book or go through the book with me. So I break the why into three categories. So for yourself, for your community, and for the world. So first I start with you because no one does anything that doesn't make them excited about it. No one takes action. I learned this a long time ago that. Well, not a long time ago, but I followed a philosopher for many years who, his main philosophy was that we never take action unless we think it will make us happy. That happiness is the biggest driving force of all the things that we do as human beings and that happiness is the thing. So I'm trying to convince you here in the introduction that gardening is a way to be happy. I talk about how mental health is such a big issue in our culture and so important that in our minds, our mind has been shown to affect all parts of our health, not just our head, and that gardening has been shown to help that. So if you haven't listened to the episode called Garden for your Mind First, Then youn Stomach, you should totally go listen to that as a follow up to this one and I'll show you how gardening can make you happy. But I definitely believe this. I know this has been true for myself and I see this. I get comments all the time from clients and students that this is the case for them as well. Then I talk about community so that we have an opportunity with the garden to change our community for the better. As I was first starting gardening reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I know I tie back to this book all the time, but she really showed me the power of just making simple choices with the food we eat, how that can play out and change the community we live in. Wendell Berry also was an author, still is an author that greatly influenced me with his writing. And he writes about the change of food through novels. Jabercrow was the first novel I read of his. Hannah Coulter. Oh, my goodness. Best book ever. And as I read through his books and Barbara Kingsolver's, I realized we vote with our food three times a day. And I have. I feed six people in my family literally 18 times a day. I'm making change happen one way or the other, and that I can make it in a positive way by gardening, and not just by gardening myself, but how that affects where I spend my money, who I buy my food from, and my resources from. We talk about that. And then finally I talk about how gardening is good for the world. It's one of those few things that is so beautiful, so fun, so thrilling, it makes you personally happy, but it actually, when we all come together, will make a huge difference in the world at large. So I know you've heard this cheesy little story about the little boy saving the starfish. And I think it was starfish and the old man saying, that doesn't you know there's thousands of starfish to save. Do you guys like my old man voice? Sorry about that. And the little boy says, yeah, but it made a difference for that one. And I think what we so often downplay is the power of the collective. So what could actually happen if all of us grew a little bit of our own food? How different of a world we would live in. But it has to start with us, right? So each time, each of us makes a different choice, then it changes our world for the better. I got a text, early morning text from my neighbor here just two days ago. Her name's Corey. We have girls in the same class at school, and she sent me pictures of her huge cucumber. I'll ask her if she'll let me post it here. I don't think she will, but she started a garden this year, and she said, I never would have started this if it weren't for your encouragement. Well, she watched me all last year grow on the side of my house. And then she. She got my book and started her own garden, too. It's those little things. You don't realize how you can actually impact people by doing a little bit yourself. Okay, so those are the three reasons why you should start a kitchen garden. Those are the whys. So I heeded Simon Sinek's advice, and I started with why, literally in my introduction. I started with why so that you don't read through and wonder, what's the point of everything I'm reading here or should I even go for it? Because it is going to get tough and you're going to find that as we go through the book club together, it's going to get dirty. So I'm trying to give you this future pacing and this vision of what's possible before we dive in. So, yeah, that's the preface and the introduction to Kitchen Garden Revival. I hope you enjoy. Well, I know you enjoy. I always say this. I hope you enjoy. I thought you would enjoy hearing the why of why I wrote these pieces the way I did. If you did, please come and leave a review of the podcast and come and let me know on Instagram or Facebook or YouTube what you think about the first session for the book club. I'm so excited to dive into this with you, and I think it's super fun to get to tell you the background of why I wrote it the way I wrote it. Hopefully this makes it not less magical, but more magical to you that you can go back and read it and it makes even more sense why it's written the way it is. And hopefully you can do these exercises, if you haven't already, do the future pacing of the preface. Think about yourself as a gardener. Find your spot that's going to be a kitchen garden. Have gratitude for the little things in your life and discover. Recommit to finding magic in your everyday life. And then commit to the bigger mission, the bigger purpose of bringing back the kitchen garden all around the world. And then think about your why, what's most important to you, what makes you listen to the podcast, what makes you committed to gardening and growing a little bit yourself. Because if you know your why, that will push you through the what and the how, because those can get a little complicated. I'm going to finish up with a paragraph about the revival and then we'll close this session up. Can you hear me crinkling the pages of my book? All right, here we go. A revival is a magical thing. It's something I can wish for, but I cannot. But it's not really something I or any one per. Okay, let me start over. That was horrible. Here we go. A revival is a magical thing. It's something I can wish for, but not really something I or any one person can make happen alone. It's like a seed that's starts small and is barely noticeable at first. It must be buried and grow strong roots even when no one notices. There are a thousand things that could go wrong, but with just the right amount of rain and sunshine and not too many weeds are pests. That seed can grow so big and so fast that no one could tell where the vine begins or ends. Perhaps this book will be that seed. Fingers crossed. But I'll need you to bring the rain and the sunshine. All right. Rain and sunshine, that's you. And I need you to be that for the kitchen garden revival. This is our mission. If you want a future, pace with me. My real big mission is that gardening becomes normalized again. That gardening is mainstream. I write this down all the time. I am on a mission to mainstream gardening. My vehicle for doing that is the kitchen garden. The kitchen garden is as yoga pans is to yoga. So I am on a mission to be the lululemon of gardening. I want to make kitchen gardens the vehicle that everybody gets. I want every single person to have a kitchen garden. And I think if all of us could find a kitchen garden that fits us. I truly believe that in the coming years we will see a 50% increase in the amount of Americans and friends worldwide that are gardening. And I just can't think of a better thing for the world. I know it's going to be good for us that we'll be happier. I know it'll be good for our communities. And I know it'll be good for our whole entire planet. It is a mission worth getting behind. And I'm so thankful that you've spent this time with me to take it on. So. So I will see you next week for the first chapter for our book club. So stay tuned. If you don't have your book yet, go get it. Gardenary.com book Sign in to get the emails for the book club, get all the insider information and join me on Instagram and YouTube and all these fun places where we'll be diving into the book together. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow Yourself podcast. I'll see you next week. Phew. That was a long one. Thank you for listening to Grow Yourself with Me. I hope you love this behind the scenes view of the preface and the introduction. Could you believe there's so much in just five pages? What? You know me, I like to pack it in just like I do in my garden. Thanks for listening. Forget Today's episode is brought to you by the Green Thumb quiz. Listen, when you take the quiz you'll get registered in to get all of the book club details. So go to gardenary.comquiz you'll find out what we think you are in the garden right now, what level we think you're at. And we'll give you resources to help you grow to the next level. Thanks again for listening. I'll see you next week, Sam.