From the Ground Up by Jeanne Nolan

Author:Jeanne Nolan [Nolan, Jeanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64447-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

I PULLED HIM TOWARD me to kiss him; I was laughing and crying all at once, so overwhelmed with a feeling of relief and the rightness of it that I didn’t realize I hadn’t given him an answer until I saw his questioning expression when I finally sat back. I picked up the ring with the diamond, smiling, and he slid it onto my finger.

IN LATE FEBRUARY, Verd took to the streets to post flyers for the upcoming gardening season. He spent hours roaming the North Shore with tacks, Scotch tape, and a thick sheaf of Organic Gardener flyers, gathering local knowledge from librarians, store owners, and chambers of commerce about the shops and bulletin boards with the highest foot traffic of retirees who might be interested in organic food and of families with young children. He found out which bakeries in Wilmette, Glenview, Lake Forest, Deerfield, and Highland Park were the most popular places to buy kids’ birthday cakes, which restaurants were the most and least child friendly, which coffee shops were where young moms liked to grab a break with friends after dropping their kids off at school.

As February turned to March and the calls started coming in, his hard work, combined with word of mouth from the previous year, paid off: The number of clients jumped to thirty—more than double the number of the previous year. I scrambled to meet with prospective clients and draft proposals for their gardens, often staying up until 2 a.m. at the old fold-out desk we’d set up in a corner of our bedroom before waking at 6:30 a.m. to get Thea ready for kindergarten.

I faced a new challenge in writing those proposals: With Verd and Kord now doing most of the physical work of building the raised beds, constructing fences, and trucking in compost they picked up from Ken Dunn’s Resource Center in Kord’s F-150 (which kept bottoming out under the weight), estimating the cost of individual gardens was more difficult than it had been when I’d worked with subcontractors who’d charged a set fee. The three of us spent hours sitting at the kitchen table poring over the garden designs I’d sketched out and trying to calculate the cost of supplies and the amount of time the bed and fence construction would take. Still, somehow, we always wound up underestimating, and the business lost money in the first few weeks—sometimes hundreds of dollars per garden.

Verd and Kord did beautiful work, though, and I never had to worry about whether they’d be where they said they’d be or how they’d interact with clients. Over time, I learned to track and compare similar gardens and our estimates got much better. My designs were improving, too, as I became more comfortable working in new towns and neighborhoods, interacted more easily with clients, and got more skilled at balancing the beauty and the functionality of the gardens. My relative inexperience, though, led to some near disasters.

One of my first calls for the season brought me to a castlelike stone house less than half a block from Lake Michigan in the town of Kenilworth.

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