Garden Coach

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What is a garden coach?

As your garden coach, I am your own personal horticulture expert and instructor.  This is an hourly service offering customized advice on any number of gardening and landscaping topics.

Your garden questions answered!

During your garden coaching session, you are free to ask any gardening questions you might have from any gardening topic.  Our session can be related to specific plant issues such as ID, health, or maintenance questions like “what is this plant?” or “what is eating this leaf?”.  It can be a pruning lesson or a time when I show you how to cut back or divide your perennials.  We can talk about soil health, mulch, or best strategies for dealing with weeds.

Quick on-site design

Garden coaching is not the same as landscape design.  Certainly we can address design-related questions, such as “what should I plant here?”, “how can I add winter interest to my garden?”  or “how can I help people find my front door?”.  This service is for someone who is looking for something more informal than a scaled drawing.  I can make a quick on-site, not-to-scale sketch of a new planting, or I can simply spray paint a bedline, or flag where a new tree might be located.  If you are looking for plant suggestions, it is great if you have a map of the space ready, and some photos taken and then printed out (use the black & white “draft” setting on your printer) that I can draw right on.  We can also meet at a local nursery and I can help you select plants that would be appropriate for your space, soil & light conditions, etc.

Garden advice from an organic gardening perspective

In the interest of full disclosure:  I like to avoid the use of chemical fertilizers and herbicides, and that is the perspective from which I will speak during our meetings.  I can educate you why I feel that holistic, organic approaches are better than synthetic if you are interested!  But I won’t advocate for use of weed & feed or round up as solutions but rather will recommend non-toxic approaches.

This is one of my very favorite services to provide.  I love helping gardeners learn new skills & plants, and I love helping people “bond” with their gardens.  This is a great housewarming gift for new homeowners, to help them decode the landscape they’ve just purchased, and to help them get ideas for what they might want to do to make it “theirs”.

To schedule your garden coaching session, just contact me or give me a ring, 360.632.0686.