Why Don't You Have a Green Thumb?

Welcome to the Grow youw Self podcast. Surprising stories about the food we eat.

And inspiring conversations about what it really takes to live the whole and happy.

Life we're all craving.

My name's Nicole John C. Burke, and I'm the owner of Rooted Garden and gardenary Incorporated and author of the upcoming book Kitchen Garden Revival. Is it obvious I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden.

Each week here on the Grow youw.

Self podcast, you're going to be shocked at the things you'll learn about foods you eat every single day. And you'll feel encouraged to take little steps in your own busy schedule to create a more whole and happy life for yourself. So turn up the volume and let's do take a walk, go on a drive, or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Every time you listen, I promise you'll learn something that will help you grow yourself in a new and exciting way. Sound good? I think so. Now let's dig in.

Nicole, that is so great that you own a garden business. I would love to call you, but I just would never be able to because I literally have two black thumbs. Oh, wow. That's so pretty. I love your garden. You're so lucky that you have a green thumb. Oh my goodness. I could never do what you do. I literally have never had a green thumb. I even kill fake plants. Have you ever said one of these sentences? Well, today's episode is for you. It's for everybody who says that they don't have a green thumb. I can't wait to discuss this idea of a green thumb with you and explain why you and nobody really has a green thumb. So. Sound fun? I think so. Today's episode is brought to you by my Garden Coach Challenge. I am so excited about this coming up in March. As you know, I run two garden businesses and began my business, Rooted Garden with the idea of teaching people how they actually can discover their green thumb. I did this by becoming a garden coach and one of my passions is helping gardeners from all over turn their passion for gardening into a profitable business. Well, I am leading a free week long Garden Coach challenge and if you are a gardener and have ever thought about the idea of coaching others and helping others start to garden as well and actually getting paid for it, then you gotta jump in and join me in the Gardenary Garden Coach Challenge. You can find out more about it@gardenary.com challenge. Come join me, sign up and don't miss it in March when I'm going to teach you how to take your garden Knowledge and turn it into a profitable garden coach business. It's going to be so fun, so easy. I'm going to simplify the process for you and show you how it's possible. All right, now that we talked about how you're going to become a garden coach, let's first talk about the idea of a green thumb and why everybody thinks they don't have one. Let's dig in. Have you ever heard the two words green thumb, especially in the context of people basically excusing themselves from ever trying to keep a plant alive again? Well, I have been shocked over the last five years with how many times I've heard the excuse that this person and that person and this other person just doesn't have a green thumb and therefore has no interest in what I'm doing. As a garden coach. I was first introduced to this concept. I'm not sure I grew up hearing the words green thumb, but almost as soon as I started telling people about my business rooted garden, I started hearing these two words used very often. I would, let's say, be introduced. I remember one of my first times I was introduced to a group as a speaker, and the speaker said, oh, here's Nicole. You know, she does this and that. She's going to talk to us about gardening. I'll never be able to work with her because I have two black thumbs. And I was like, oh, gee, thanks. That was a great way to set me up right before I talk. And then one time I was doing like an outdoor market. It was actually with one of my friends, the nester, Michael N. Smith. She has a great festival every year in her home in North Carolina called the nest Fest. So this is a designer focused event, but I signed up to have a tent there just because I love her and I wanted some exposure in the garden space. So my husband and I went there. We worked in her kitchen garden for the day as kind of a display of what's possible. And then I set up a booth to talk about garden coaching and had, like, herbs and pots and things like that to sell. Well, I can't tell you how many people, literally, I mean, she had hundreds of people there, maybe thousands, and they would walk by and just go, oh, that is so cute. Too bad I don't have a green thumb. And it was like woman after woman after woman walked by and said that. And this was my first full year of business. So it really hit me, like, oh, my goodness, like, there is a serious mental blockage here that I'm going to have to work super hard to overcome. In order to accomplish my goals of garden coaching, my dream is that everyone in 10 years will have a kitchen garden and be growing a little bit of their own food. A huge part of that, I soon realized, was if I have this goal and this dream that everyone's growing a little bit of their own food, but everybody pretty much believes that they can't, then I'm going to have to do some serious mental work to help them overcome this idea. This set me on a path of figuring out what is a green thumb. Where did this idea originate? And how in the world am I going to help people get over this belief that they just don't have one? So in this episode, we're going to dig into the history of the idea of a green thumb, where it possibly came from, how we have morphed it and turned it into something completely different. And then we're going to address the 10,000 hour theory and figure out how we can use it to discover our own actual green thumbs. So let's get, get growing. Oh, that was so cheesy. Let's get going. Okay, so I did some Googling, of course, and tried to dive into the depths of the Internet to discover where the idea of a green thumb originated. So, to the best I could find, it seems like it started around the 1930s, so right in between the world wars. And it looks like the idea of green thumb actually began with the idea of a green fingers. And this began mostly in the UK and Britain. So one guy, celebrity gardener, you may have heard of him, James Underwood Crockett, he actually died, I think, right after I was born. So for all those decades before he ran, he did a PBS show called the Victory Garden and is basically known as a celebrity gardener. Okay. So one of the things that he suggests is that the idea of a green thumb actually started in the uk and it's from this idea that algae grows on the outside of pots. So you've probably experienced this if you've ever tried to grow something in a terracotta pot. You know those bright orange clay pots that over time, when they stay wet at the bottom, a little green algae forms. It'll kind of turn white and then it turns green. And so the first idea was basically that people who hold those pots a lot move those pots around a lot, their fingers pick up that green algae and eventually start to look green. And so this was, you know, the first. This is when people would say, okay, that guy has green fingers, or she's got green fingers. The main point was like, is touching a lot of pots with algae on them, or maybe that they've just been touching a lot of plants. And then over time, what came to be is instead of just green fingers, which, I don't know, you guys can correct me if you live in the UK and, you know, differently, but that the word green fingers kind of became green thumb mostly over here in the U.S. so another theory that he proposed is that perhaps it started all the way back when King Edward the First was reigning in England. And he loved green peas, supposedly. And so he, you know, he had all of his servants shelling peas constantly because he. He just loved peas. He was like a super healthy legume eater. And so the story has it that basically he had, like, 12 servants constantly shelling peas for him during this season. And whoever had the greenest thumb in each season won a prize from him. Now, this is a great story. Who knows if it's actually true? The idea is somewhat the same, right? It's that when a green thumb comes from touching green things. Yeah, sorta. Kind of, maybe. So that's Crockett's theory, is that it started with this idea of people who had their hands basically on green things quite a bit. And so they developed green fingers or a green thumb. So here's where it gets tricky. Suddenly, now, instead of that kind of original thought where green thumbs come from, touching green things a lot, in other words, spending a lot of time with plants, suddenly the idea of a green thumb has morphed. And so now if you Google it or check Wikipedia or Webster's Dictionary, it says things like this. So Webster's dictionary defines a green thumb as an unusual ability to make plants grow. And Wikipedia says a green thumb means a natural talent for gardening or a gardener with such a talent. So do you see how that changed? Okay, so the beginning, the original idea for the green thumb is that it literally is just about exposure, right? It's just about someone having their hands on green things and their fingers turning green because they're with green things so much. But now, let's see, that was 1930, so we're looking at, like, 90 years later. The definition has nothing to do with exposure and has everything to do with just natural ability. Just something that you're either born with or you're not. So it's funny, right? Like, we took something that meant that was a little bit more meaningful and aspirational in the sense that really, anybody can hold a lot of pots, right? Or anybody can shell a lot of peas. And so a green thumb was basically attainable for everyone to suddenly, you know, this is more like a supernatural ability. You're either Harry Potter or you're not, right? And so suddenly, this is no longer, you know, something that's accessible to everybody. It's only for few. I think that's the perspective that I'm often faced with when people, you know, dismiss what I do or say that, you know, they'd love to learn from me or love to have a garden and love to do what I do, but they don't have a green thumb. It's with this second idea that they're really coming at me, right? They're thinking, you know what? You were born this way, and I just wasn't. So I want to introduce the idea of the 10,000 hours concept and apply it to the green thumb. Now, if you are anyone who loves great writers, you probably already read this concept over the last decade. It was recently popularized by the great Malcolm Gladwell. He has so many great books. If you've never read his stuff, you've got to. But in his book Outliers, he introduces the concept of the 10,000 hours. Now, he kind of borrowed or expanded on this from an original study 40 years ago in the American Scientist. This. These two guys, Herbert Simon and William Chase, did this great study on chess experts and people like, what's that guy? Bobby Fischer? And they started just kind of studying these grand champions. What do they call them, grand masters, right. In chess. And they came up with a conclusion that no one is born with the innate ability to be amazing at chess, but that even people like Bobby Fischer, who just seemed to be, like. What's that word? Like a savant, like someone who just was so natural at it. It. They reached that status because they spent at least a decade's amount of time with intense preoccupation with the game. So they estimated that any kind of master or grandmaster in the area of chess or really any other, like, really intense subject matter became that way, not because they were born that way, but because they spent 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions. That's a lot of time, right? Malcolm Gladwell popularized this by basically proposing that we could become a master at almost anything, given we're willing to give it 10,000 hours. Now, there's been all kinds of debate on whether, like, he's actually right and what role natural talent really plays, but the facts still stand and have been proven again and again that the people who are great at things are people who do things a lot. So I want to take this and pull it into the area and the idea of gardening, and think about the fact that the green thumb. Take that original definition of the green thumb and what we've turned it into and apply the 10,000 hour rule to it. So if we look back at the origin of the green thumb, this idea that people who have green fingers and green thumbs are that way because they touch a lot of green things, this really sits in well with the 10,000 hour theory. Right. Basically, if you are touching green things for 10,000 hours, then your fingers are gonna start to, like, you know, bring on the green hue. I have to admit that I never, ever, like, ever had green fingers unless I, like, painted my nails green or something. But I remember one of my first years when I got really super excited about gardening. I had done tomatoes for a few years and then really honed in on a method I was going to use to grow tomatoes in my Houston garden. I planted 26 tomato plants, all kinds of different variet, and I was using the Florida weave method. So if you haven't ever heard of it, super fun and a way to grow tomatoes, a lot of tomatoes in a very small space. So in two four by eight beds, I had 26 tomato plants planted. And I was, like, literally committed to my method. Now, the Florida weave method requires lots of pruning. Like, you have to come in weekly and you fertilize your tomato plants and you prune them heavily. So you're pruning the leaves, particularly the lower leaves off of the branches, weaving the plants in and out of the strings for the Florida weave method, and you're feeding them. And I was getting epic results. I had more tomatoes on these vines than I'd ever seen before. The plants were so beautiful and coming so early. I think my first pictures of those tomatoes was, like, in, I don't know, early April or something. It was incredible. Well, each weekend I try to give, you know, my tomato plants, say, 30 minutes to an hour to go and do all the pruning and feeding. Like, I was. I was a little obsessed at this point with my tomatoes. And I'm telling you, I would come. I remember one of the first mornings when the plants were really taking off and I came out of the garden and looked down and my fingers were literally green. Like, they had a green hue to them and they smelled of a tomato plant. And all of a sudden it hit me like, oh, this is a green thumb. Like, this is what's meant by the idea of green fingers or a green thumb. It's Literally just someone who spends hours with green things so much so their fingers turn that color. This is when I really started to buy into the 10,000 hours idea and became 100% committed to debunking the green thumb myth and helping people, including you and all my students and all my clients, see that it's really not about natural talent. It's a lot more about spending time with plants. All right, so hopefully I'm convincing you that, yes, you do not have a green thumb right now, but that doesn't at all mean that you can't have a green thumb soon. But 10,000 hours. Oh, my. That's a lot of time, right? So I did a little bit of calculating and tried to figure out, okay, how long is 10,000 hours actually? Do you know? So 10,000 hours. First I divided it by 40 because I'm thinking, okay, what if someone was going to garden, like, full time? Like, full out, going to just garden, garden, garden, garden. 40 hours a week. So if we divide 10, 10,000 by 40, we get 250 work weeks. So that means you would literally commit to gardening for 250 weeks of work. So just quit your job, quit taking care of your kids, whatever it is that's currently requiring 40 hours of your time a week, and just go out and play in the garden. Sound good? And if you do that, 250 work weeks, let's assume that you work 48 weeks out of the year. So I think that's pretty reasonable. Let's say you took off for, like, two weeks at the end of the year and maybe a week for spring break and a week in the middle of the summer. So for 48 weeks out of every year, you're working. So any guesses as to how many years you're going to have to work in the garden full time to get the 10,000 hours in? Well, it's right around five years. So this is the secret, guys. The way to become a green thumb, the way to get your own green thumb, is all you got to do is for five years, I need you to work in the garden for 40 hours a week for 48 weeks out of the year. Sound good? I'm waiting. I'm guessing that most of you are like, yeah, Nicole, that's not happening. And honestly, there's no way that could happen for me either. So the 10,000 hour rule is super cool if we're like a kid, right? Or you know, someone that's, I don't know, know 10 and has lots of time after school to pursue A new skill or hobby or someone I guess who's just starting out in their career. But for me, when I first wanted to start gardening, I was more like 30 and more like had four kids that were under four and a half and barely had time to brush my teeth. So let alone spend 40 hours every single week in the garden learning how I was going to find my greens thumb. So what is a girl to do? Like let's say you actually do now I've kind of convinced you that maybe you can find your own green thumb. But there's no way you're going to find 10,000 hours to devote to gardening to learn this skill. Well, no need to worry, we're going to talk about it right now. So I want to go back to Malcolm Gladwell, the amazing genius that he is. So a lot of people push back. Like if you google the 10,000 hours you'll see all these people be like that's not true. And here is all the evidence why people just because they spend 10,000 hours doing something doesn't mean they're actually going to become pro at it. So he's kind of had to go back and defend his theory and things like that. So one of the studies was about, it was violinists, like one of the best violinists and how much time they practice and what they did start to find, I think this guy David Ebstein did a follow up book or his own kind of book. Part of what they found is it wasn't just about the hours. There was some kind of talent involved and the main talent was that that person knew what to practice or they practiced in a certain way or used a certain method. Right. So it wasn't just like they were blindly spending 10,000 hours doing something. There was a clear method to it. So there was some intelligence, there was some talent involved and most of that was in selecting the way they would spend that time. So it is true, you could literally like go outside and for 10,000 hours just spend some time with plan and you would make some progress. But it would probably be pretty slow progress. Looking at this study and then thinking of my own experience and what I've watched with my clients and students is the way that we make the most of the time that we actually have is we're smarter about the way that we practice. So I wanna propose some good news for you that you actually don't have to give gardening 10,000 hours to get good at it. And that actually a green thumb can be found in a pretty simple fast way. If you do, right? So you are gonna have to have a little bit of natural talent. It's not that you know how to make like that you can just touch a plant and make it grow. It's more that you have the talent to pick out the right method and to apply it so that you can maximize the amount of time that you spend learning to garden. So here it is. You're just gonna do three things. When you want to set out to get better at gardening and find your own green thumb, the first thing you're gonna do is pick a method. So this is super important right now. Online, literally, probably a thousand different things you could do in the garden. You could do mushroom gardening, you could do garlic growing, you could do permaculture, you could do composting, you could do row gardening, you could do homesteading. You could do orchard growing, you could do kitchen gardening. You can do raised beds, you can do container gardening, you can do microgreens. Do you see what I'm saying? There's like a million ways to garden, guys. And if you're spending a lot of time on YouTube or Instagram or Pinterest, you are almost immediately going to be super overwhelmed about what to do when you're ready to find your green thumb. So here's my recommendation. Pick one. Pick one thing you want to learn to do as a gardener. One way you want to develop your green thumb. One method. That's what I like to say. Just pick one method. Generally, I like to break the methods into just a few things. Like, you could do small scale gardening indoors, like microgreens or sprouts. You could do container gardening. You could do kitchen gardening, which is like raised beds. Or you could do something like row gardening or homesteading. Those are the different levels I like to divide food gardening into. So if you want to approach food gardening, which I really want you to, then pick one of those levels. Do you want to do something small indoors? Do you want to do container gardening, a kitchen garden with a raised bed, or more like a row garden or a homestead. So pick one of those methods that best fits you. And then the second step is tip. Pick a teacher. Just one. So again, on Instagram, on YouTube, on Pinterest, you're going to be exposed to all kinds of teachers. All of us are out there trying to talk about our own gardening methods, our own successes, you know, because it's super fun to show off your success in the garden. I like to say the garden is 100% Instagramable. So when you start to see all these different people. It's going to make you feel like you have to follow and do something that all of them are doing. And that, again, can feel overwhelming. If you look at some of the best, say, violinists or chess players or whatever, any kind of expert that you follow, if you read their story, you'll soon discover that they grew their career and their expertise by picking one teacher at a time and studying from that teacher over a prolonged period of time until they basically mastered that one method. So that's what I want you to do, too. So you're going to select your method, and then you're going to select your teacher. And then finally, I've already hinted at this, you're going to commit to a period of time that you'll learn from that teacher. So I want you to give it at least a year. Now, if it's something super simple, like, let's say, sprouts or something, maybe you could do more like six months. But most of the time, the way we fail is we give up too soon. So we'll try one teacher or try one method, try it for a short period of time, get frustrated, and then move on. Most of us fail not because we won't figure it out or it's not possible, but because we just quit too soon. So I want you to give yourself at least one full year to study under that one teacher and that one method. This, my friend, is the way that I have grown so fast, so quickly in so many areas over the last decade of my life. I've literally picked one thing I wanted to learn. I've studied, picked, and then decided which method I wanted to use to learn it. I kind of scoured the field and picked the person I thought was best to teach me. I paid for whatever they had to sell me. Whether it was a course or a book or a workshop, I paid for it. And then I literally downloaded and studied every single thing they offered in that particular method. I have grown in so many ways over a short period of time because of learning this. So I want to propose it to you if you are ready to discover your own green thumb. Now, pick any method of gardening that you want to, but pick one that fits your lifestyle and where you are, your space and your time and your ability right now. Pick something that inspires you and that will be of interest to you and something that feels attainable. Then scour the Internet, do whatever you have to do to find a teacher that can teach that method to you in a very understandable way, and then buy every single Thing that teacher has to offer. Listen to that teacher's teachings, sign up for their workshops, go to their classes. However you can get around that teacher to literally absorb all that they've developed in their own knowledge base over the last few years, get it, and then commit to a long period of time that you're going to learn from that one teacher. Make sure you make the time period long enough to let you fully exhaust all the things that one teacher can teach you. This is a secret. This is a way to get a green thumb. It's really the way to get anything. Yes, sometimes to become a pro, it is going to take 10,000 hours. But the way that we can shorten that and not have to give five years of our professional life to learning every single thing we want to do in our lives is to find teachers who have committed that much time to their particular method or skill and learn from them as quickly as possible. I'm sure you've experienced this, and I know I have. When I find a good teacher, it grows me exponentially. I get to absorb all the years they've spent in a very short period of time, which literally maximizes my amount of time for learning a new thing. Does this make sense? I am so excited to introduce this idea to you. If you haven't heard it before, I love the 10,000 hour concept, and I love the way that we can go back to the original definition of a green thumb and we can grab back onto it and suddenly make a green thumb attainable for all of us. So generally, when someone says they don't have a green thumb, they may mean literally that they feel frustrated and they're just certain that it's a natural talent they could never have. Or I think deep down, probably most of us know that original definition, right? Most of us know that if we actually tried something and put our mind to it and committed to it, we could learn almost anything. But most of us feel overwhelmed. And so the way to get uncomfortable overwhelmed is to pick a method, pick a teacher, and to commit to learning it over a period of time. A green thumb is really something that none of us have to start with, but all of us can have if we want to. Here's the good news. Studies show that when we put our hands in dirt, we literally feel amazing. So many studies have shown that there's a lot that goes on when we touch soil and we touch plants. I've published articles about seeing green, how studies have shown that when we look at green things, we literally feel calmer, we feel happier. We feel more inspired. Other studies have shown that when we touch soil, it's like endorphins are released in our brain. I'm sure you've heard of the blue zones. There's all these studies that show that people live longer and they live happier lives when they're connected to plants and soil. I think there's this whole theory, something called grounding or something that happens when our feet touch the earth and our hands touch the soil and the leaves. I guess we'll have to do another podcast episode about that. In other words, I think the people with the green thumbs are the people with the happiest brains, the happiest emotions. So even if you feel a little overwhelmed or like maybe this is just going to be too much work, I'd love to propose to to you that it's absolutely worth it, because it's not just about growing plants. It's literally about growing yourself. Do you see how I did that? So cool, right? Okay, so just to recap, a green thumb started. The whole idea started not about natural ability, but about people who are touching green things. That's where the idea of green fingers and green thumbs began in the first place. Then we morphed it, we changed it. It went from green fingers to green thumb. And suddenly, instead of being about practicing, the idea of a green thumb became this idea of a natural ability. People who literally could touch a plant and make it grow because they were born with the talent. But the 10,000 hour rule that has come to us over the last decade proves the original idea that a green thumb is possible for all of us if we'll just commit some time. Time to it. But the 10,000 hour rule is also kind of unattainable for most of us who have a normal life, have children, have jobs and other responsibilities that prevent us from giving a full 10,000 hours to learning to garden. So the way we can shortcut that and make the most of the time we do have is by picking one method, one teacher, and committing to learn from that teacher and that method for at least one year. Sound awesome? I think so. My hope is that over the next 10 years, I'll hear less and less people tell me the excuse that they weren't born with a green thumb and instead come up and say, you know, I don't have a green thumb, but I'm getting one. I can't wait to hear people start to talk about green thumb in the way it was originally proposed that green thumbs come from hanging out with green things. As you know, I am a garden coach and my dream is always to help people learn to discover their own green thumb. So if you haven't heard of my Kitchen Garden Academy, I do just what I propose in this podcast. I teach one method, kitchen gardening, and I am obviously the teacher and then I teach it over a six week period of time. So if the method you're wanting to learn is kitchen gardening, you gotta check out the Kitchen Garden Academy. You can find out more at kitchengardenacademy.com or on the Gardenary site@gardenary.com All right guys, so anytime you hear someone tell you that they don't have a green thumb, you now have the beginning for a very good discussion around this issue. Right? Let's redefine what green thumbs mean again. Let's go back to that original definition and then let's just cover the world with green and just take our hands and just fill up on the good stuff, touch as many green things as we can and hopefully come and side with the green thumbs we've always dreamed of. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next week. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast. Don't forget that the Garden Coach Challenge is coming up. If you love this idea of having one method and one teacher and learning from that one teacher over here time, then you've got to think about becoming a garden coach yourself. Listen, I'm on a mission to help over a thousand gardeners start a profitable profession as a garden coach and I would love for you to be one of those thousand. I'm hosting a free Garden Coach Challenge in March and I want you to be part of it. In this five day challenge, you are going to learn how to take the knowledge and experience you already have and package it up in a super awesome Garden Coach package that you can present to your friends, to your family, to people you've never met before in your own town or city. It's going to be so fun. You'll get to meet lots of great gardeners and you'll be inspired to help the world discover their own green thumb too. So go sign up for the Garden Coach challenge@gardenary.com challenge and please don't miss it. Thanks so much for listening. I'll you see. See you next week.