Gardenary Is a Gardening Education Platform

Okay, so when we left off in our story, I was growing Rooted Garden, and at the same time, I was receiving messages from both gardeners who wanted to start a similar business to Rooted Garden and beginner gardeners who wanted services like what we were providing in Houston but in their cities and towns.

Hearing from both parties sparked an idea: perhaps I could create an online platform that could train gardeners from around the country to start their own companies like Rooted Garden and that could be a place where beginners could seek garden professionals to help them.

In 2017, I founded Gardenary. The name came from my hope to make gardening ordinary again. But I knew that no one was going to make gardening ordinary again by simply selling more garden stuff, more plants and more pots—we've tried that already. In fact, according to a recent landscape industry report, people in the US spent $42 billion on garden products in 2020. When you add in spending on landscaping services, the total becomes $157 billion.

Billions and billions of dollars, and yet I noticed a critical piece was missing. Products were being sold and services were being hired, but the average person still doesn't know what to do in their own garden. People across the country are spending money on things for their garden but never feeling like they have a "green thumb".

The missing piece was education and training from a knowledgable garden consultant. Gardenary was founded to be that missing piece, to fill the gap between products/services and education.

What Garden Coach Academy Has to Offer

I registered my new business Gardenary in 2017. In order to test if I could really take my education model and pass it on to other gardeners around the country, I announced the Garden Coach Academy right around the holidays. This was to be a training where I took all of the lessons I'd learned from my own business and turned them into an educational course.

Within a few weeks, I had three gardeners sign up to join me. While that number isn't impressive by any stretch, it gave me encouragement that there might be a way to move this forward after all, so I kept growing the program by adding more training and coaching. By April of 2018, we had 40 garden coaches.

By the end of 2019, we had 135 garden coaches.

Garden Coach Academy has been running for about seven years now. The growth has been so exciting to watch.

My goal was to teach the lessons in a way that gave my students all but a turnkey business. And I'm proud to say now that we have achieved that. The program itself is like a plug-and-play model: you take the instructions and the directions to then go and start a business of your own.

I have seen so many gardeners successfully start their own garden consulting business, often in as little as three months and some in as short a span as 30 days. Students enroll in Garden Coach Academy, choose their niche (the thing they want to teach to clients), set up their own business, and begin doing garden consultations.

A lot of my students do a model similar to mine with Rooted Garden—raised bed kitchen gardens. But we also have plenty of garden coaches who focus on other aspects of garden consulting, such as these 12 inspiring garden coaches, who've branched out into compost, permaculture, food forests, container gardens, restorative gardens, native plants, cut flowers, and more.

Why This Business Model Works

No matter their specialty, the trend has kept proving true: when these gardeners decide they're ready to turn their passion into a profitable business within Garden Coach Academy, when they make that commitment, the change happens. Within 30, 60, or 90 days, they're venturing out on their first consultations and securing their first clients.

We even see many gardeners who join and then earn back their investment in the program within their first 90 days of joining.

I'm so excited to keep spreading the word about Garden Coach Academy, and how, if you love to garden too, you can be a part of this incredible movement we're creating through Gardenary, and how you can help us make gardening an ordinary part of everyday life for every single person.

That's not going to happen simply through product sales or service appointments. It's going to happen by us taking our own experiences and knowledge in the garden, turning them into a teaching system, and then passing that on to clients and students who are right in our own towns and cities.

In Part Four, I'll walk you through all that’s included in the certification program and help you decide if this could be a good fit for you. If you love gardening and you would love to build a business doing something you love, I'm gonna take a guess that Garden Coach Academy will be the perfect fit for you.