Meet Sara Rubens of Seed to Sanctuary

I got to chat with one of the world's most inspiring gardeners on the Grow Your Self podcast. Sara Rubens is transforming Davidson, which is just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, into a beautiful, edible, luffa-covered city! Her business, Seed to Sanctuary, does kitchen garden design and installations, plus garden coaching.

At the Gardenary Summit last November, Sara gave me a little gift-wrapped luffa sponge that she'd grown herself (in North Carolina no less, even though most people think you have to be in the Deep South to grow these things!). I couldn't wait to go home and take a shower!

Sara is going to tell us what gardening for 10 months out of the year looks like in North Carolina, and then how to grow her now-famous luffa gourds.

What Does Your Garden Look Like from January Through April in North Carolina?

I use January as an opportunity for rest and rejuvenation and a little bit of strategy, and I recommend my clients do the same. You and your garden could both take a little breather.

In February, we start to gear up for the season. We figure out what we're going to plant and make sure the growers are going to grow all those plants for my clients.

March 1st arrives, and boom! We're in all the gardens planting them up for spring with brassicas and lettuce and beets and carrots—all those really fun plants for cool weather. Some of my clients are already asking when they can plant tomatoes, and I'm like, "No, no, honey, you can't plant your tomatoes yet." I help my clients understand our seasons here in North Carolina a little better, and then we just watch those cool season plants grow and thrive.

Our last frost date is usually April 15th, but I don't trust that because, inevitably, we get a late frost in early May. Even so, many local gardeners don't realize they can be growing stuff all spring.

What Does Your Garden Look Like from May Through August in North Carolina?

May 1st comes, and we're busy in our gardens, pulling out spent plants and adding tomatoes, peppers, squashes, plus all those other wonderful vining plants that so many gardeners are the most excited to grow. We continue to grow these plants all through summer.

The summer is also when I teach my clients how to prune, harvest, control pests and disease, all that type of stuff.

What Does Your Garden Look Like from September Through December in North Carolina?

In September, it's time to pull the spent plants from the summer. Squash is pretty much done, but I leave tomatoes and peppers in the garden.

Then, we have a repeat of our spring crops—brassicas and roots especially—and that takes us all the way through November. I can typically keep my tomatoes in my garden until about mid-November, when we have our first good frost.

In December, I work on getting the gardens tucked in for winter. I pull out spent plants, leaving the roots to decompose in the soil because it's good for it. I cover up the gardens with leaves and wait to start all over again in February.

I tell my clients that we have a 10-month growing season here in Davidson, North Carolina (mid-February through mid-December). You certainly could grow more if you want to, but I find that most people need a little bit of a rest in the winter.

How Do You Grow Your Instagram-Famous Luffa Gourds?

They take a long time to grow, so I think North Carolina is probably about as far north as you can manage them. I'm in zone 7b.

How to Plant Luffa Gourds

I plant the seeds outdoors in April, right after the last frost. The seeds look like little pumpkin seeds.

I do all raised-bed gardening, but in this case, I have a gigantic pergola that has like a 12-foot farm table underneath it. There are 3-foot-tall and 2-foot-wide pots on every corner with irrigation hooked up. I direct sow the luffa seeds in those pots so that the vines can climb up and over my pergola. I plant about 5 seeds per pot, and I let them all grow to maturity. The vines will all grow up, and they have these wonderful tendrils that help them grab onto the posts.

It takes longer than you'd think for the luffa seeds to sprout—maybe even 3 weeks. I'm always like, "Are they really growing?"

The plants get drip irrigation every day. I help the plants wrap around the posts when they're little by wrapping some twine around them, just until they get established. Then it's like Jack and the beanstalk. I mean, you wake up the next day, and your plants have grown like crazy. And suddenly, around the middle of June, you have these huge yellow flowers that will become the luffas. The bees love these flowers, so I've never had to hand pollinate or anything.

How to Harvest Luffa Gourds

This is the hardest part: you don't do anything to your plants for a bit. The gourds will become quite heavy. You'll have all these green gourds hanging down—it's quite a conversation piece!

But this is a waiting game, and you have to wait and wait to harvest. Well, you can harvest them to eat, but I don't do that. If you want luffas, you have to wait until they're completely brown and crunchy on the vine. Even when they're brown and crunchy, you should shake them to make sure they're ready. If you can't hear the seeds rattle inside like a rain stick, they're not ready.

Once you harvest them, they won't ripen any further. They'll just rot. So you have to wait until they're totally dry and rattling on the vine. For me in North Carolina, that means you wait until after your first frost to harvest them. This past November, I asked my landscape guy to come up and try to save them before frost hit. He was climbing up my 10-foot pergola with a gigantic tarp to drape over it. I don't know if it did any good or not, but it made me feel better, actually.

When we took the tarp off, the vines were definitely waning, but I still had a boatload of luffas hanging down. They didn't show any signs of stress.

How to Process Luffa Gourds

After harvest is when the fun begins. Each luffa is like a great big cucumber. Take a sharp knife and cut off both ends of the luffa, then score down the middle of the skin. It'll be so crunchy you can just peel it. It's kind of like stripping wallpaper, you know? It just comes right off. As soon as you lift it up, all the seeds come running out. So now you have a ton of seeds to give to people.

Cut the luffa up into sections the size you'd like your sponges to be. Then douse them in a diluted Clorox bath just to make sure there are no bugs or whatever inside. Finally, you let them sit and dry. Or if you're impatient like me, you can put them in the air fryer at 300°F for about 3 minutes. They'll come out dry and crunchy, and you're ready to give homegrown sponges away for the holidays!

I have a friend who makes homemade goat milk soap, so I made little gift baskets for my friends with luffa sponges and seeds and the soap.

Have You Always Been a Professional Gardener?

Oh my goodness, no. Like so many people, I was stuck at home during Covid and decided I needed something else to do. I was already working full time as an account manager, and I wasn't about to give corporate America more than the 8 hours a day of my time they deserved.

I thought to myself, I'll dabble in gardening. I had never gardened before—ever. I didn't grow up on my grandparents' farm. My parents didn't garden. I didn't even have an herb garden before. But I was sick of being tied to my desk.

I reached out on my community Facebook page first. "I want to learn how to vegetable garden," I said. "Is there anybody out there who can help me?"

I had a couple people respond that they could come talk about flowers or something. Finally, I asked a landscape guy, "Hey, could you build me a couple raised beds?" I didn't know anything about raised beds. I didn't know that they should ideally be over 1 foot tall. I didn't know we shouldn't use pressure-treated lumber. I did it all wrong first.

Even so, I had a little success, so I decided to go all in. That's when I read Kitchen Garden Revival. I was so intrigued by the beauty of the gardens in the book. I tried to jerry-rig my stupid raised beds that had been built incorrectly so they could fit a Modern Arch Trellis.

My husband, God love him, said, "You know what, Sarah? We've got nothing going on. We can't travel, we can't spend money on anything else. If you wanna just rip it out and start all over again, you can."

So that's what I did: I ripped it out, started all over again, and built it exactly to the specifications page by page through Kitchen Garden Revival. And my garden turned out exactly like one of Nicole's gardens. I mean, I followed her little protocol, and by God, it works.

So How Did You Turn That into a Career as a Garden Consultant?

I posted pictures of my new garden on Instagram, and people started reaching out to me saying, "Oh my God, Sara, your garden is so beautiful. Can you help me?"

I had major imposter syndrome. But anyway, there was this restaurant right in the middle of my town of Davidson that I'd walked past a zillion times. It had great visibility, but there was this empty, forgotten plot of land next to the parking lot—maybe 25ft. x 25ft. I don't know what possessed me to do it, but I picked up the phone one day and took a picture of the overgrown plot and sent it to my neighbor, who happened to be the developer of the building the restaurant was in. I said, "Hey, Mike, what are you gonna do with this sad little piece of land? It needs some love. I got an idea for ya."

He writes back, "What are you talking about?"

I said, "Come meet me someday in my garden. I've got an idea for you."

A couple days later, he walks into my yard, and I take him around the corner so he can see my garden for the first time. I said, "This is what I wanna do for that little piece of land."

He said to me, "Oh, I would love to do that. But one, I don't know who's gonna build it. And two, who's gonna maintain it?"

"I'm going to." And right then and there, I started my business.

What's Your Favorite Thing to Make from Your Garden Harvests?

During Covid, I started doing this fun thing where I hosted lunch in the garden. I was starving for intentional interaction with people, but I wasn't interested in being in a big group or having a bunch of small conversations. I just wanted to sit down with a friend and say, "What have you been up to?"

So what I did was I set up a table on my screen porch outside, so it was outside/safe, and I would invite one person over for lunch on a Friday afternoon. Everything I made was garden-themed. It wasn't anything fancy. I'd start off with some iced tea with a sprig of rosemary or fresh mint. And then we would have a little snack like a piece of crostini with some herb-infused cream cheese and a slice of cherry tomato on top. The main course might be a fresh herb quiche, plus a spinach and Swiss chard salad. Sometimes I'd make scones with fresh herbs. So each element of the meal had something out of the garden.

It gave me so much joy to share the garden with people, and it gave my friends so much joy.

What's One Plant You Refuse to Grow?

I tell all my clients when I'm planting up their summer garden that I do not plant summer squash because it is just so difficult with the squash bugs. They just infest these plants, and once they get in, you can't get rid of them. I have had no success with growing squash, so I tell my clients that buying squash is the perfect way to support our local farmers' market. Because we are not planting squash in our gardens.

It's just not worth it, particularly for my coaching clients. I don't want them to feel like they're a failure just because they got the God-forsaken squash bug. Everybody gets the squash bug! So my solution is to just get rid of the squash.

What Advice Do You Give People Just Learning How to Garden?

Just do it. Don't wait till you think you're ready. Don't wait till you think you know everything you need to know. Just begin the process and learn as you go. There's so much content and so much information available.

And ask for help. My very first garden, I didn't know how to do a planting plan. For some reason, I felt intimidated by it. Now I laugh about it because it's really not rocket science. Once you learn how to do it, you understand it. But I hired somebody to help me.

What's Your Favorite Client Success Story?

I can't even tell you how much I love all of my clients. I really do. I don't have a single person that makes me think to myself, "Oh, do I really have to go see them today?" No. It's been so, so, so wonderful.

But I do have one particular client who struggles with rheumatoid arthritis. She realized that being outside in the fresh air, getting her hands in the dirt, just made her feel so much better, body and soul. She had done a little gardening on her patio before, but she found me through the Gardenary consultant inquiry page.

Truth be told, her home is 2.5 hours away from me. I initially told her I'd do a design for her but that she'd have to find somebody up in her neck of the woods to build it. But the more I talked with her, the more I realized I just wanted to help her. And so I reached out to my crew that does the installations and said, "I think I have a pretty big opportunity. Would you be willing to travel there for this opportunity?" 

We ended up building her an absolutely gorgeous, huge garden, and we planted it for the first time in March. By May, you absolutely cannot believe how abundant this garden was. And she is just living her best life in the garden. She has a community that comes and helps her, and she grows more food than she needs, so she gives a ton away. She's so generous and kind.

It's just been such a wonderful journey to go through with her, and we've become quite personal friends. I had a tragic situation happen in my life this year. She had a daughter getting married, and we just have begun to do life together.

There is nothing like chronic pain that makes you want to find a distraction that's good for you. I gave her a sense of purpose. She has a reason to get outside and move every day. Some days she has bad flareups and it's hard, but then her friends will come over to help her, so it's just a beautiful example of how she adopted the Gardenary lifestyle. She really did.

What Do You Love About Being a Garden Consultant?

It's awesome, it really is. I don't have to ask anybody for permission—Can I drive 2.5 hours away for this client? I could just make that decision myself. Every day, I wake up, and literally it's like a rooster that says, "Oh my God, the sun is out, and I get to be in the garden today. I get to talk to people about gardening. I get to learn about gardening. I get to post about gardening." It's just so life-giving.

Follow Sara & Prepare to Be Inspired

Sara told me she wants to be known as the lady who transformed her town so that the majority of people in the community are now growing something at home. I'm pretty positive that's going to happen sooner rather than later, especially after everyone sees her work.

If you live in or around Davidson or Charlotte, North Carolina, Sara Rubens is your woman. She could come to your yard next! And no matter where you live, you should follow Seed to Sanctuary on Instagram for some inspiration (those luffa gourds!) and gardening tips. I love following Sara. I watch every single video she posts, which is saying something 'cause I don't watch much stuff from other accounts.

Talking with Sara and watching her journey to becoming a garden consultant has brought me so much joy. It's an honor to be associated with her. Gardenary is the place to go to learn how to start a garden or how to start a garden business, and Sara is a wonderful example of doing both!

Thanks to Sara Rubens for letting us use her beautiful pictures of her and her garden.