Grow for Good - Mindful gardening on Adelaide’s Westside
In 2021, Brooklyn Mabbott decided to build the job and the business for
herself that she couldn’t find out in the workforce - a business raising
seedlings grown with love and attention, and a mentorship program to make
gardening and connecting with nature more accessible for individuals with
disabilities. It’s taught her a lot about balance, independence, and having
the courage to take the road less travelled.
The key stats:
Year established: 2021
Location: Brompton
Land: About 8m2 of above-ground growing space along Brooklyn’s residential driveway
Water: Water paid by housemates, plus a rainwater tank of about 15,000L
Energy: Rooftop solar
Soil: Sandy loam with lots of organic matter, and a seed raising mix made by hand
Capital: About $1000 set up initially with all inputs, ongoing is some inputs and buying of seed
Labour: Mostly just a solo business at the moment with occasional help here and there
Production: Seedlings, as well as the service of gardening mentorship as a wellbeing and therapy tool
Suppliers/Inputs: My compost comes from SA composers and my backyard where I make some up myself. I get vermiculite, perlite, coco coir and sand from Port Adelaide Food Gardening, seeds from Fairview, Active Vista, and the Diggers Club and fertilisers from Bickleigh Vale Farms
Markets: Grow for Good stock a range of seedlings at Port Adelaide Food Gardening and Gobles Pet, Grain and Garden, and also sell direct from their driveway in Bowden. For pre-orders Brooklyn occasionally grows for Village Greens, or friends who would like to make an order.
Transport and reach: Mostly the local community and social circles
What’s the project, in a nutshell?
Grow for Good is a self-described “mindful gardening service” that is committed to helping people live consciously and in connection to nature and the people around them.
“It’s horticulture therapy, so I want to focus on mindful gardening as a technique… it’s about just being really slow and in connection with your garden,” Brooklyn explains.
Brooklyn’s belief in balance, self-awareness and personalisation is deeply ingrained in her work with her clients, which also guided the way she has built her business to suit her own needs and lifestyle. The result is a business that grows and shrinks, lulls and evolves, constantly around her. That is exactly how Brooklyn wants it.
At the moment, Brooklyn’s business is made up of two core components – a small seedling-raising nursery, and a mentorship program that supports people living with disabilities to connect with nature through gardening.
“The circle of values around the business encapsulates both of those things… being in connection with humans and nature.”
Brooklyn’s seedlings can sometimes be spotted in independent gardening stores in displays that she sets and restocks herself. Her mainstay, though, is seedlings picked up right from her very own front yard.
“Right now I do do a grow-to-order scheme.” Brooklyn explains. This grow-to-order style of nursery means an often-changing and diverse workload that Brooklyn can maintain to whatever scale she likes, often growing to accommodate orders from groups like Village Greens of Willunga, other times shrinking to allow Brooklyn time to focus on other pursuits and facets of the business.
Making your way along her unsuspecting Western suburbs street to collect your seedling order, you can gauge whereabouts Brooklyn is hovering on her spectrum of busyness from the spread of pots and greenhouse space steadily making its way down the driveway of her humble residential rental.
“And then the stuff I do with Kurt is through the NDIS… I’m a provider.” Brooklyn says, going on to explain the myriad of activities that she organises for her NDIS client, Kurt, and herself to get up to as part of the service. “[I’ll go to his house] or he’ll come to mine or we’ll go to the botanic gardens… it literally is different every week.” The activities range include everything from excursions to different natural spaces and gardens to hands-on days digging in the veggie patch, and are all guided by Kurt and the ways he wants to engage with nature.
“I’d say with the mentoring I’m almost at capacity.” She says, considering it for a moment. She’s referring not just to her one-on-one work with Kurt, but also sessions run in collaboration with local councils, an area she is beginning to explore more.
“The work I’m doing with [local councils] is networking with the council and other little organisations [to run events]. It’s a lot of working on gardening in the community with people with disabilities, so it’s all about accessibility [in council-managed spaces]… not necessarily looking for more [one-on-one] clients.”
As always, for Brooklyn it’s all about balance, making sure that the work she’s doing in her business aligns with her values and capacity, while also following the work that keeps her feeling excited and fulfilled.
“The disability side of things is more cognitive; education, workshops. Then the seedling side of things is more ‘alright, I need to be putting things out into the world, I need to be doing it’. It’s more of a doing thing.”
“Seedlings won’t really make me money, you’d have to have it at a pretty big scale… so the mentoring does buffer that a lot. It is in many ways a lifestyle business. It’s really carefully planned so I don’t hate my life.” Brooklyn confesses with a laugh.
How did this all get started?
“I’ve always been business-minded, I’ve got an entrepreneurial mind.” Brooklyn says.
It wasn’t just this head for business that started her off on the road to creating Grow for Good though. It came with a gradual shift in perspective on what forging your own path in the working world can look like.
“It was maybe five years ago that my mind was first opened up to the idea of having an alternative lifestyle.”
Brooklyn was inspired by the many friends and acquaintances she has known and admired over the last few years who were following what they loved instead of choosing a job and a lifestyle that might’ve given them a more stable and simple day-to-day.
“You just make it work.” She says of the friends balancing the many balls they have in the air – be it music production, yoga teaching, art, and all the various odd jobs in between. Often all at once.
“You just juggle this life, and yeah sometimes it’s messy, creating your own life.”
It's a lifestyle that keeps you on your toes when you don’t have the stability of long-term employment, but in the eyes of many people, including Brooklyn, it pays back tenfold in autonomy, fulfillment and variety.
“Before working at Village Greens I was actually struggling trying to find a job in the workforce that aligned with my values… it’s so important to me, I almost find it impossible spending time and energy on work that isn’t meaningful.”
“The other reason that I was pushed to do it is that I was working [before Village Greens] at a commercial nursery.” She adds.
“It was pretty horrendous seeing the practices that they did, as in environmentally horrendous, and I almost couldn’t handle it at some points. And I thought, wow, there’s almost no available-to-public, quality, healthy seedlings.”
“There’s no education around it either, people just think that they’re buying a plant, and then they have a bad experience with it because it’s unhealthy, and they don’t realise just how much synthetic fertiliser and pesticides and stuff went into growing that plant… The footprint of growing that little plant would be wild.”
It was around this time that Brooklyn discovered NEIS – a government program developed to support unemployed individuals to build even the smallest of ideas into a successful business.
“I’ve had a few friends do the NEIS program.” She tells me.
“[At that time] I was doing odd projects here and there and struggling financially and struggling mentally… I was already getting people just naturally asking for advice about how to start their veggie patch though, and I realised ‘oh, yeah, you can actually make money off your skills’. So I started looking into NEIS.”
That was back in May of 2021, and though the eight-week intensive business course component was a challenge, Brooklyn came out the other side with a toolbox of great resources that would form the foundations of her new business.
Any tips for those wanting to start something similar?
The first mention when it comes to the resources that gave Brooklyn the boost she needed must, of course, be NEIS, and Brooklyn couldn’t speak highly enough of it.
“It gives you a real push-start.” She says.
“NEIS is a good resource and tool because its supporting you to do it slowly… You do a business certification and also get an allowance and any money that you earn on top of that allowance you get to keep.”
“It’s really good, I’d recommend it… it’s a lot of typing, but at the end of it you’ve got this thing that you can use, it’s not just an assignment.”
After the eight-week intensive, individuals come out the other side with a thorough business plan, budgets, and a mentor to meet with once a month for ten months. It’s only after the planning documents are given the tick of approval that the fortnightly business start-up payments begin to come through, and although Brooklyn was impatient to speed through the slog of paperwork and research that marked the start of the program, she confesses she’s grateful for it now.
“If I’d had the money at the start I would’ve just blown it on things.” She admits with a wry smile.
“Once you’ve got a business plan it’s really clear what you need to spend the money on.”
What’s been the biggest challenge so far?
One of the biggest challenges that Brooklyn has run into, both with Grow for Good as well as her work beforehand, is the choices she must make about how she spends her limited time.
With such an autonomous, unstructured and diverse approach to work and life it can be hard to enforce your own bounds on the demands of the day, and for a long time Brooklyn tells me she was a chronic ‘Yes Person’.
“We’ve got opportunity stress [as a generation].” She comments, referring to the persistent fear many people share of slowing down, not being productive, or missing any single opportunity offered their way.
It took time, but slowly Brooklyn began to realise the value of saying no, and the fact that it’s only by saying no to some things that you are able to say yes to the things that really matter to you.
“Saying no doesn’t mean that you won’t get offered more.” She adds.
“With experience you learn… I’ve actually said yes to so many jobs I hated just because it’s gardening. I’d get to the end of the day and be covered in weed seeds and whatever else and I would be so unhappy.”
Even now, having stripped down the many side-jobs so that she can focus her energy on the business she is steadily growing, staying realistic in her goals and being kind to herself is a challenge she admits she’s still working on.
For Brooklyn, it’s about keeping it simple and steady – not rushed, not impatient, but a business that keeps rhythm with her life.
“You’re one human. And over the last five years I’ve been unpicking this conditioning of busyness. It’s this very capitalist conditioning of busyness and I’m seeing everyone around me drop like flies. I think there’s a balance there.”
“I’ve talked a lot with my mentor about being stuck in this perfectionism, this blockage. It’s a mixture of perfectionism and shame, there’s a lot of shame around marketing my business… putting yourself out there constantly.”
With access to so many incredible stories of success and overachievement just a social media scroll or online search away, it can be hard to feel the true value and achievement in building something ourselves from the ground up that might seem unremarkable by comparison, and feel like our efforts are never quite good enough.
The real achievement, then, is celebrating these impressive, humble projects as they are, not as a lesser version of what they could be.
What’s the best part?
“I’ve learnt a lot about money.” Brooklyn begins.
“My understanding of it all [running a business] has really helped my confidence, you know, because to start with I just felt like a kid trying out a lemonade stall.”
For Brooklyn, a small business like hers is a demonstration of just how much is possible, and how much freedom and self-direction a person can build into their lives by deciding to take the leap. It was a freedom she first glimpsed working with a friend who had recently taken that leap themselves in starting Dandy Pansies.
“When I was working at Dandy Pansies I would post a story of me picking flowers for four hours a week and people would be like ‘what do you mean that’s a paid job?’”
“We created it, we made it a paid job, so I could employ one of my friends to pot up little seedlings for four hours a week… it’s deconstructing capitalism in a way that is cool and interesting.”
“[At Dandy Pansies] I could visualise how I could set up my driveway, and I’ve seen that someone who is of the same status as me, working class, queer, all that type of thing, can just do something because they wanted to.”
Now, with her own steadily blossoming small business, Brooklyn gets to see her own hard work playing that same role for others – an example of a life and a career diverging from the common script to create something new, exciting and entirely her own.
Why should people support a local food network in South Australia?
“I’m not just going to be an advocate for the smaller scale because there is a benefit to the larger scale.” Brooklyn says thoughtfully.
A larger scale of food production can bring huge benefits in stability, infrastructure and efficiency, and Brooklyn has seen that first hand. In her experience though, it can come at the cost of adaptability of practices, and cause a business to lose sight of their values and impact in the pursuit of profit.
“When I was working at the commercial nursery, I’m not against that large scale, it’s just that their practices are so deeply embedded for generations and so tied up with money and all these things so for them to implement changes it’s going to take them, what, five years?”
“For them to catch up their practices, it’s such a beast… and they were doing that to an extent, but for them to do that fully it would have to take the boss or the owner having those values… or for me to get high up enough to really make a change there, but that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.”
“Big scale is good if they are doing the right practices… it would be so good to see them using just beneficial insects [instead of chemical insecticides]… it’s totally doable. And then they could be a real example of what’s possible.”
“I wonder if at a large scale there’s this tipping point where it's suddenly more about money… when I was working at the commercial nursery I was like wow, this is not a seedling nursery, this is a money nursery. This is money embodied in plants.”
On the other side of the coin is the small-scale production that Grow for Good is now a prime example of, where the work Brooklyn does is just about as close to the community as you could possibly get.
“There’s so much more transparency there [at the small scale]… you can talk to the person who’s growing your stuff.”
Selling seedlings out of her home driveway, anyone who orders from her really knows who Brooklyn is and what she stands for. They can see exactly what goes into the process right before their eyes – a lot of love, a lot of potting mix, and nothing to hide.
As ever, though, Brooklyn is the voice of balance.
“Village Greens is this perfect example of the small-scale heading towards the large-scale. It’s upscaling every single year.” She points out.
“We’re doing it because it’s the right thing to do [not just for profit]. It’s this paradigm shift.”
Can a business scale up with all the benefits to productivity and efficiency that come with it, without losing its core principles? Its values and focus on the way it impacts the community and environment? Brooklyn thinks it is definitely possible, and that all these diverse contributors to the food system have a role to play.
Tell us about the future – what’s next?
Brooklyn has been building up the foundations of her business for just over a year now – working out her goals, her vision, and her process.
“I’m glad actually that I haven’t been putting too much into the marketing side of things because I don’t feel confident with my product just yet and slowly I will, I want my whole heart to be behind it.”
Slowly but surely, she is making a start on getting the word out about Grow for Good, building from a freshly designed brand logo and social media profiles, and a website and marketing plan on the cards for the near future.
Brooklyn has exciting plans for where she could take Grow for Good next, like starting up a subscription for seasonal seedling packs and deepening her work with councils and local institutions.
First and foremost, though, Brooklyn is building a business that fits harmoniously into her life rather than dominating it, and carefully curating exactly the work she wants to be doing for herself.
