Designer Kitchen Gardens

Kitchen gardening has been growing at a phenomenal rate over the past few years. Many people are discovering that planning and planting a kitchen garden is a rewarding and satisfying experience. Families value it as a way to help their children make healthy eating choices and enjoy the outdoors. Lengthy waiting lists for allotments are evidence of the resurgence of interest in growing your own fresh food – a trend that seems to have been boosted by the recession and celebrity-chef endorsements of sourcing fresh produce.However, just as with ornamental gardening, there are also busy people who would prefer to enlist the services of a garden professional to plan, plant or manage their vegetable garden. To fill this need a new breed of garden companies are springing up – the ‘managed service’ industry of edible gardening – and it’s a huge growth area.Take QuickCrop for example (www.QuickCrop.ie). Based in Ireland, they combine nursery, garden design and maintenance services into easy ‘Planted Garden’ packages that can be bought online. For €395 they will supply, build and install a 6x3ft raised vegetable garden that is guaranteed to succeed. Customers can choose to have the design customised and can add on services such as maintenance or supply of extra plants. It is a great partnership because customers will often return for more plants in following years.In America many garden designers are likewise discovering a new opportunity to use their skills to help people reconnect with the land. GroOrganic (http://www.groorganic.com), based in California, supply ready-made vegetable gardens, consulting and maintenance services. They are seeing such rapid growth that they are franchising their concept across the country.What is particularly attractive to these new companies is the sustainability of the business model. Installed vegetable beds are the perfect basis for an on-going business relationship with the customer. Some people will want a complete package with the beds planted and maintained. Others may enjoy the gardening themselves but, encouraged by the success of these highly-productive gardens, will then decide to expand to more raised beds and a wider variety of plants such as fruit trees and bushes. Customer referral rates are high and it’s easy to see why they are thriving.Managing hundreds of vegetable gardens does introduce its own challenges though. Customers often expect a premium advice service for these bought-in vegetable gardens. With each garden different and the need to manage and rotate crops from year to year, it can easily turn into an organisational headache. Many are turning to online garden planning software such as GrowVeg.com which has just added management features to its highly acclaimed Garden Planner software.Garden designers can now choose a ‘master account’ on GrowVeg.com which enables them to create and manage garden plans for each of their customers. Their customers can then receive their own personalised plan of the vegetable garden which helps them visualise the garden that will be installed and request any changes. The system can then send twice-monthly emails detailing the vegetables that need to be sown or planted for their garden design along with growing tips and articles to help them along the way.Quickcrop Director Niall Mc Allister says “Through my experience the better planned the gardener the greater the results. The Growveg.com Garden Planner has been invaluable to the customers we have done installations for. It also has the added advantage of the customer taking control of their patch so any phone calls with queries tend to be more constructive.”Garden Planner subscriptions are available at significant discounts to garden design companies to add as a premium service for their customers. It solves the problem of helping each customer achieve success with their new vegetable garden whilst making it easy for the designer to manage hundreds of individual vegetable gardens from year to year.

Further details are available at http://www.growveg.com/subscribebulk.aspx

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