Five Years In: The Garden Metrics That Matter
This fall, Tennessee Kitchen Gardens turned five years old. I didn’t really think about celebrating the anniversary at the time—there were fall gardens to plant, new designs to draw, cars to vacuum, and new brakes to buy. Besides, I wasn’t quite sure how to sum up the ride so far.
But that’s the grand friction of this newsletter. This biweekly note is my chance to connect with you—my garden people—and even when it’s hard to comb through my thoughts, I don’t want to skip it. One of you may have been my very first client (looking at you, Barbara). Many of you shared a cup of coffee and a garden dream from your kitchen window, and we became part of each other’s lives for a season. As we exit 2025, it feels worth naming this milestone—if only to acknowledge that this work has settled into Middle Tennessee in a way that feels steady, familiar, and right.
The Right Work
Since the beginning, this growth has felt less like a surprise and more like a confirmation. It often seems that this garden company was simply answering a question people were already asking. People wanted to connect with the land beneath their feet, to taste basil and tomatoes that hadn’t traveled across the country, and to slow life down just enough to notice what was growing.
I registered the business name, launched the website, and built Barbara’s garden in October of 2020—not with a grand plan, but with a quiet sense that this might work. By November, two more clients had called—friends and acquaintances who wanted to yank out their boxwoods and grow something useful. There wasn’t much convincing involved. People were already curious, already ready.
By the time 2021 rolled around, I met Kim, a passionate new gardener whose husband had built a sprawling pandemic garden out of pine posts that were slowly tumbling down the hill in their Nolensville yard.
I redesigned the garden of my dreams for Kim, then dusted off my Spanish at a Franklin irrigation shop to enlist help from a team of incredible masons, carpenters, and landscape specialists. Together, we built raised beds into the hillside and this beautiful garden became home to Kim’s extensive dahlia collection and every tomato she could imagine. We capped it off with a drone video, a few Instagram posts, and then the calls kept coming.
By then, it was clear that the work was taking hold. Gardens were being built, tended, and shared. But what stayed with me most wasn’t the scale of the projects or the steady stream of new clients—it was the way these gardens kept showing up in kitchens and conversations, in the rhythms of everyday life.
In December of 2022, I was invited to a Christmastime dinner at Jennie’s house with one of the men from our installation team. I was there mostly to translate—Esteban was the real center of the evening. His stories had everyone leaning in around the table; the kids adored his big smile and his enthusiastic, slightly off-key attempt at “Jingle Bells.”
The meal itself told the rest of the story. Jennie served dishes built around what the garden had given her—pickled and preserved vegetables, sugared rosemary, cocktails muddled with thyme. The table was full of warmth, gratitude, and laughter. It was a reminder of how gardens show up not just in beds and borders, but in kitchens, conversations, and the way people gather.
This year, we got an email from Joe and Marcie, a couple who had just built a big garden for their daughter. “She wants to make vegetable soup for the whole family,” they told us. Abi became their steady guide through both the overwhelm and the curiosity that followed—answering questions, making plans, and translating big enthusiasm into small, doable steps. At the end of the season, we were rewarded with a crayon drawing of a pile of garden vegetables—proudly labeled, carefully colored.
Maybe that’s the truest five-year marker I can offer: a crayon drawing of vegetables made by a child who believes gardens can feed the people she loves.
As we begin year six, I’m deeply grateful to keep doing this work alongside you—to keep showing up, paying attention, and letting something meaningful take root.
