For anyone who has ever dreamed of a bountiful victory garden of vegetables but can’t seem to get started, maybe you just need a good mentor. Enter Sarah Ruzic and Abi Tapia of Tennessee Kitchen Gardens. This pair of entrepreneurial green thumbs can design, plant and maintain the garden of your dreams, all while teaching you to cultivate your own kitchen-sized crops.
When former English teacher and longtime gardener Sarah found herself whiling away the pandemic among her backyard crops of cabbage and carrots, she decided to elevate her hobby to a business. In spring 2020, she signed up for a garden-coaching course with friend Nicole Burke, the Instagram-savvy founder of Gardenary, which teaches aspiring garden coaches to start up their own consulting enterprises. Through that class, Sarah met Abi, a singer-songwriter with her own garden-coaching goals. Sarah began to build a team of carpenters and masons who could construct garden beds, and soon her business was up and running, with a steady stream of clients whose “summer jungles” needed tending. Sarah quickly turned to classmate Abi to help with tending the new gardens, and eventually Abi joined full-time. Together, they create everything from raised vegetable beds, orchards and berry bushes to children’s gardens interspersed with swing sets and sandboxes.
Dreaming of sowing your own veggie plot? Here’s where the conversation might go when you call Tennessee Kitchen Gardens:
When it comes to installing a new garden from scratch, a rule of thumb is to budget $120 per square foot, with the basic minimum configuration of an 8′ by 4′ garden, i.e. starting at roughly $3,800 for design and install, including gravel paths, steel trellises and irrigation.
Once you’ve got beautiful beds in place, TKG can help with the ongoing cultivation, either by offering instruction or labor.
“We design beds for three seasons,” Sarah says, explaining the rotation of crops from cool-weather herbs into warm-season tomatoes and peppers, followed by cool-season cabbage, lettuce, kale, radish and carrots.
For kitchen gardeners equally interested in flowers, TKG can work seasonal color into the edible plan. “We do love putting in cut-flower gardens and pollinator patches. They’re a really great complement to the overall garden,” Sarah says. “Anything you can dream of, we can make it happen.”