I’m Nathan Langley and this is Maackia, a monthly newsletter focused on the season ahead and all that it brings.

I realized a funny thing the other day — this spring is the five-year anniversary of starting my business Gardens by Nathan. I’m not particularly great at celebrating milestones, and have already been sweating the expectations surrounding my fast approaching 40th birthday. As much as I like to reflect on the time that has passed, it is usually focused on assessing how well things went, what went wrong, and how to move forward. Clearly I need to celebrate more, so if you have any ideas of how to do that, I'm all ears!

In all seriousness, it doesn’t feel like it has been that long. Starting a new venture at the onset of the pandemic certainly didn’t help, never mind all the issues I have been working through the last few years. It feels more like I have been treading water than anything — trying out different ideas each year that relate to gardening in some way, while continuing to work on various garden designs. But upon reflection, all of these little projects I have worked on have felt disjoined from my design work, which probably makes it more difficult to feel like there has been any meaningful forward momentum overall.

With that in mind, I have been taking a lot of time this winter planning out a course of action for the next five years. A ridiculous amount of time to plan around, I know, but I think it is a useful exercise whether the plan works out or not. I have something stuck in my head that, I think, could be useful to gardeners, those wanting to learn how to become a gardener, as well as those who just want to have a nice garden of their own to enjoy. But I need to be purposeful in how I go about building it out. One, so that I don’t spend all of my money on an idea that doesn’t work (or that no one wants), and two, I am just one person (one that is almost 40! 😅).

Here is the first step, which, if you have been keeping up with these newsletters, probably isn’t much of a shock: I will begin selling perennials through an online store this spring.

Let’s start with the main question from last time: who will my online perennial store be for? I am going to focus solely on gardeners. There may be others who don’t necessarily call themselves gardeners that are enticed by my offerings, but they are probably those who have a foot in the gardening world door already.

What does it mean to focus solely on gardeners? For one, I am not going to sugar coat the pages for each plant I am selling and fill them with a lot of fluffy nonsense. Instead, you will always find two things: (1) an updated photo of the material I am selling, and (2) important details about the particular plant so that customers can make an informed decision about whether it will work in their garden.

Otherwise, the store will be as straightforward as possible. What you see online are the plants that are in stock. You pick the plants you want, add them to your cart, and then pay for them.

The only trick to this “store” is that there won’t be a physical store to visit. Instead, I will email pickup instructions to those who make purchases, which will include scheduling a time to pick up the order when it is ready.

With the plants looked after, my next challenge was to create a support system for novice gardeners and those interested in learning how to become a gardener. I dabbled a bit with this on the maackia website over the last few years, but decided to create a whole new space on my main website. I wanted to reduce the amount of website hopping as much as possible while increasing the visibility of my resources.

As such, I have created a new membership program that currently incorporates the following:

my garden design guide
my garden recipes
my how-to planting / transplanting details

Accessing these resources will cost $5 CAD per month, or $50 CAD per year.

In addition, I also wanted to offer a discount to those who become members and purchase plants through my online store. So for yearly members, I will forward a $20 CAD coupon code that can be used on orders totalling $50 CAD or more.

The final component to this membership program will be priority responses to gardening questions from members. In this too-connected, yet somehow completely disconnected world we live in, I thought the least I could do was spend some time answering questions from those who actually want to learn and / or already love gardening.

The last component to my website redesign was to redo the section on the services I offer to those who just want to have a nice garden and not have to think about it too much. These services will still include garden designs and on-site consultations for the season ahead.

Not much has changed with these services or their deliverables, but I tried to clean up their specific webpage so that it gets to the point quickly without too many distractions. Consultation booking will now be done online and paid for ahead of time, which will hopefully cut down on no-shows and those who just don’t feel like paying for the services they sign up for and receive.

Phew, that was a lot! In addition to all of the above, I still intend to further develop my trial gardens at home, as I think that work will positively impact the different components I just described above. I don’t think I will necessarily do another pop-up newsletter for that work, but I am not entirely sure yet. We will see how busy things get.

I will, however, continue to work on YouTube videos in my spare time. Funny enough, I find editing in Final Cut surprisingly relaxing. Not sure where that little experiment will take me, but I am having fun with it.

One last thing. If you, dear reader, are a gardener who lives in the Sudbury area and are interested in learning when my online store will open, please consider signing up for my store’s mailing list (or forwarding this email to someone you know).

Thanks again for following along!