What's Your Dream Job?

"You've got my dream job, by the way..."

These were the words a kind woman shared with me a few years ago as I was leaving a meeting regarding the design of a kitchen garden for a school community. Honestly, her words took me by complete surprise. I had someone else's dream job?

I remember first seeing the woman who had what I considered to be my dream job: It was ten years ago during a visit to Charlottesville, Virginia. My mom and I were walking around Ivy Nursery with two of my young children, when I saw this woman wearing a gorgeous sun hat and watering the orchids.

At the time, I was a stressed-out mom. I was doing contract work on my computer every day back at home, and finances were a little tight while my husband was finishing grad school. Here was this lady totally zenning out with her plants, and I remember thinking, “Wow, she's got my dream job. How fun would it be to tend plants all day... and actually get paid to do it?"

Watching the nursery employee at work planted a little seed of a dream inside my heart. Little did I know that ten years later, I'd have two companies built around the garden and a woman would be coming up to me saying I had her dream job.

How I Built a Business Around Gardening as a Job

When I saw that woman at the nursery, I had no idea how working as a gardener for my profession would materialize in the years to come.

In the fall of 2015, I founded Rooted Garden, my kitchen garden company based in Houston, Texas. When I first started my business, I called it Rooted Garden Goods, thinking I'd be selling bags of lettuce and other produce from my garden that I was growing in abundance. Shortly after, however, a friend of mine said, “Nicole, I don't want to buy stuff from your garden nearly as much as I want to learn how to garden the way you do.”

A light bulb went off in my brain! I realized, Oh my gosh, that sounds so much more fun than washing lettuce. I want to teach people; I want to be a consultant and a coach! I changed the name of my company to Rooted Garden and began to advertise my company as a garden consulting company. The rest is history. 

In my first year of business, my company provided services at all different levels. I posted the progress we were making on Instagram, and I began receiving tons of messages from gardeners saying, "You have my dream job. How did you get started? I wish you could help me do that where I live!”

Another light bulb went off, and I realized, Now I have knowledge that I could share with other people around the country and even around the world who want to set up their own garden coach business too!

So I launched the Kitchen Garden Coach Society in late 2017 (it's now called the Gardenary Consultant Certification), and over the last four years, I've trained hundreds of gardeners to start their own garden coach business across the country.

I do think that garden coaching is the dream job, and I'm on a mission to train gardeners all over the world to grow their own profitable garden consulting business. Let's explore five different models that you can follow to turn your garden experience and knowledge into a profitable profession and make money gardening.

5 Different Gardening Job Descriptions

Here are five different ways you can go about working in the garden and earning money for your knowledge, skills, and expertise.

• Garden Coach - A garden coach teaches their gardening knowledge to beginner gardeners to help them learn to grow.
• Garden Consultant - A garden consultant recommends and sells items to help their clients grow better in the garden.
• Garden Creator - A garden creator comes up with garden designs and planting plants for their clients.
• Garden Contractor - A garden contractor contracts out the work of installing the garden and delivers a turnkey garden product to the client.
• Garden Constructor - A garden constructor builds the garden for the client themselves. (Hint: Some skill with hand tools required.)

Let's dive into these five different ways that you could make money as a gardener.

Gardening Job: Garden Coach

A garden coach is someone who has enough knowledge and experience to be able to convey that information in a systemized way to a student. 

Here’s the thing: I hear so many people say, "Oh, I would love to grow a garden coach business like yours, but I just don't have enough experience yet.” 

Look at it this way: In high school, you do everything for the first time as a freshman. Then you become a sophomore. You're still not at senior level; you haven't mastered every single aspect of high school yet, but you have figured out how to be a freshman. Seniors have become so removed from that freshman year that they've forgotten what it was like, but for sophomores, their memories are fresh. That makes sophomores the most qualified to help freshmen through the challenges they're facing.

As a garden coach, all you need to be is the sophomore. You just need to be a couple steps ahead of your students.

What makes someone a great teacher is not how many degrees they have or how many certifications beyond their PhD. No. What makes someone a great teacher is their ability to empathize with the student and understand what they're going through.

I think a lot of us fool ourselves into thinking we need to be at a certain level before we can be a good coach or a teacher, when we really need to be as close to the experience of our students as possible. We just have to be able to take our knowledge and turn that into a system we can pass along to students and make them feel accomplished—that's what coaches do.

You can build systems of knowledge for almost any area of the garden. The first system I built was for salad gardening. I broke how to grow your own lettuce plants into a few steps, and then I taught that step-by-step method to my students. Once you've decided what you're going to teach and you've developed a system to teach it, you just have to find a way to distribute it. Maybe you'll teach one on one, or maybe you'll teach your methods to a larger group. There are so many different ways you can do it.

Here’s the cool thing about being a garden coach at this level: Almost anyone can do it, and you can do it with very little setup required because the main thing you're selling is your knowledge. 

When I first got started, I advertised a salad garden workshop at my house. The package included getting to harvest your own salad from my garden and then learning my system for salad gardening. Did I make a ton of money in that first workshop? No, I did not. But it gave me confidence, and I continued to expand my knowledge. 

Gardening Job: Garden Consultant

As a garden consultant, you'd still be a garden coach; you'd still develop systems based on your own garden experience, but you'd go a little bit further and actually recommend products that you'd sell to your students. This takes your business to another level. 

When I first started, I'd have clients say, “Okay, I'm ready. Can I set up a salad garden?” I'd point them to products to use and maybe sell them a raised bed or some seeds, making a small profit on each product.

This is a simple way to begin making a profit as a gardener without needing to have a storefront and inventory, plus the overhead that comes with them. You base your purchases and the products that you're selling on the one-on-one or group coaching sessions you're doing.

Most people think they don't have green thumbs because they go to a garden store and are sold all these different products without being told what the best products actually are for their situation, much less how to use them. They bring the plant home, and when it dies, they end up thinking it's their fault, when really, it was just a bad product match.

As a consultant, you can offer your clients a much better experience by recommending products that you know are going to work based on the system you've developed. You can pretty much guarantee them this is going to be a great product for them, and then coach them through the whole process. You're their support structure as they set up their gardens, which allows them to have confidence instead of feeling lost.

Gardening Job: Garden Creator

You can earn money by creating a garden plan for your clients. From planting plans that cover what to plant when and where to put it in their garden, to a design of the actual garden space, you've got a lot of flexibility here. You're still coaching, still teaching a system, sill selling products, but now you're also telling them where every single thing goes for max success.

Make sure you know the legalities in your area. Some states have requirements in terms of who can design landscape and garden spaces, though there are usually fewer legal restrictions on kitchen gardens than other spaces.

Gardening Job: Garden Contractor

A garden contractor is a jack of all trades. You’re not just creating the design for the garden or telling them what products they need to purchase or even just coaching them. You’re actually going to contract out the labor of building the garden.

When I was building Rooted Garden in Houston, I was fortunate to have a lot of great clients, but many of them wanted us to do the work for them. They weren't interested in DIY. I did a lot of the labor myself in the beginning, but I soon ended up with projects beyond the scope of what I could handle.

So I started contracting. I found professionals with the specialties I needed (for example, a carpenter to build the raised bed), and I would contract them to do the job. I became more of a manager in those situations. I was guaranteeing my clients that they'd not only get to use my system and find success with the products I sold them, but they'd also have high-quality structures created for them.

We were taking away the stress and frustrations that go into the hard part of setting up a garden. We did all the hard work, and the clients were left with the fun parts.

Again, there may be legal ramifications for contractors, depending on where you live and work. Make sure you do your research.

Gardening Job: Garden Constructor

Basically you're the one doing all the work as a garden constructor. When I first got started, I did all the building myself but quickly learned that it was not the best use of my time and that there were others who could do these types of jobs much better than I could.

In our community of garden coaches who've been certified through Gardenary we have a good number of employees who do all the construction themselves; we even have several husband and wife teams who divide and conquer the work. Others just hire a constructor position inside their company instead of contracting out.

Is Gardening Your Dream Job?

These are the five methods to make money gardening. As you can see, they're really five different levels that build upon each other, and being a garden coach is at the heart of all five.

A garden coach focuses on transformation, not information. People, not products. The heart of making money as a gardener is putting people first. I love that about this business, and it's literally what keeps me going. 

Look, being a garden coach is a dream job, but it's not always a dream. There are good days and bad days, as with any job, but what keeps me going is the transformation—watching intimidated beginner gardeners become the ones teaching others. I love watching a client I've coached in the past explain how long carrots take to grow or what to grow up a trellis or which growing season is their favorite or how to cook the tastiest garden-to-table meal to someone else. They've become the coach.

If you have even a little bit of garden experience and this has planted a dream in your heart, you can start growing your own garden coach profession. You don't have to quit your day job. You don't even have to quit your night job. Anyone can be a garden coach and work on their own preferred schedules, including evenings or weekends.

I believe that the world needs more garden coaches. Ever since I made it my mission to bring back the kitchen garden and make it an ordinary part of daily life once again, I've seen that we're going to first have to bring back gardening as a viable profession for that to happen.

We need garden coaches in this world, or we'll be stuck with a landscaping and garden industry that's forever product-focused rather than people-focused. Until we have more coaches sharing their knowledge and creating transformations, we're going to continue to have millions who are convinced they don't have a green thumb because everything they've brought home from the big box stores has died. Because they've been sold plants and seeds and soil and fertilizer without knowing how to use them or if they're the right fit.

How to Become a Garden Coach

You might be wondering, Okay, Nicole, I would LOVE to be a garden coach. You’ve convinced me. But where do I start?

Well, you can look into our Gardenary Consultant Certification. This program trains, equips, and certifies you to set up your own garden coach/garden consulting business right where you live. After all, there are people in your very own community who are waiting for the kinds of gardening lessons or classes you could offer based on your unique growing location and climate.

However you decide to grow your self or your business, don't grow alone. Gardenary has all the resources you need to bring your dream garden coach business to life!