Today we’d like to introduce you to Piper Klee=Waddle.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Piper. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
When my husband and I moved to Texas, I was determined to have a vegetable garden just like the ones I left behind in Colorado. I am now a Texas master gardener, life long DIYer and a home gardener in every house I’ve owned. Living in an older neighborhood with large trees and NO HOA, I decided to build my raised beds in the front yard. My neighbors did not mind and I started getting requests to build vegetable beds at other homes. Many of my new friends were growers, farmers, gardeners and we all started to see an opportunity for growing related businesses. I built and maintained homeowner gardens for the first few seasons, I dabbled in growing hydroponic greens and even thought about buying land to have a market garden to provide local food to chefs. Its a real need in our area but ultimately I was familiar with small scale gardening and I landed my first restaurant culinary garden in August of 2017 =Hookline Granit Park.
The second was an herb garden for Fearings in Dallas then I picked up managing the chef gardens in McKinney for Patina Green. Patio planters for Local Yocal and help design-build, plant the gardens for Homewood restaurant in Oak Lawn Dallas. Then the big deal came in the Spring of 2019. I was asked to build a food garden as an amenity for the corporate campus Legacy Central. This is the Texas home of Samsung, Peleton and LC Kitchen which is managed by Bon Appetite Services. Holy cow the name dropping is thick! But these companies care about educating people about healthy eating choices and a food garden was a perfect fit for that corporate bullet point.
In 2019 I have designed and bid on four additional corporate campus and large restaurant garden projects. All are currently in the capital improvement approval phase and will go into effect late this year and 2020. All in all the idea of building a culinary garden for profit as a business model has evolved. I now know my gardening company has a path to not only good income but to share a valuable skill set and knowledge base that is several generations lost. For the “eat local” movement, a restaurant having a garden just steps from their kitchen is hyper-local and the next big thing in culinary service! I’m all in for growing this business for North Texas.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
The road to building a small business is never easy. I chose a business that is an activity I really love, but the nature of creating gardens for others is very physical. Iv had to build -by myself – many of the early gardens. Load up the lumber, build the boxes on site, shovel the two or three yards of soil from the back of my pick-up truck, Lay the drip systems and finally plant the garden. The idea of vegetable gardens to most people is that they are an inexpensive box of dirt. Healthy soil is a challenge in our area of Texas so raised beds are a huge benefit, but they are not cheap. Heat is a huge challenge in Texas so we have to spend time and effort managing the plants. That time is not cheap. So really the struggle has been about educating clients of the amount of work involved and that the product I sell is worth the money I am asking for in return.
As with most business ventures, the learning curve for pricing my services and products was a struggle. Once I had a few ideal clients I settled in on that target market and figured out how to service them very well. Learning to say NO to the “80%” and really work hard for the “20%” turned out to be a good lesson. Also, shameless networking was a big ah-ha moment. I was honest with the people I reached out to. I didn’t add folks to my networks to simply have more likes! I really looked for connections that I could possibly help and that might be valuable to me on the long journey.
Please tell us more about your work, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
What sets me apart is that I provide a service that typically is given away for free. Food gardening is mostly associated with the community plot or non-profits. I am charging for the service of growing food crops on site.
I design, build and maintain culinary gardens for restaurants and corporate campus sites. Most of my gardens now are associated with a commercial property with food service retail, so they are both utilitarian and an amenity for the sites. Positioning my service as an amenity gives me access to property managers and developers as a landscaper. Coordinating my gardens with an onsite restaurant or a campus food hall gives me the legitimacy of a culinary gardener. It is what makes my gardening business so unique and a perfect fit for the current culinary trends of farm to fork. The ways a restaurant bar or chef can use a simple herb garden on-site are immense and it is a visual tool that helps the staff and chef connect the patrons to the food chain.
I am most proud of the many friends and the variety of people I have encountered along with the “gardening as a business” path.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
I think the idea of a customer eating at a restaurant and seeing the Urban Dirt Co. gardens. Then at some point, they run into me and say “hey you’re Urban Dirt!” That’s a huge rush to be personally connected to their garden/culinary experience.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.UrbanDirtCompany.com
- Phone: 214-945-7465
- Email: piper@urbandirtcompany.com
- Instagram: @UrbanDirtCo
- Other: https://vimeo.com/urbandirtcogardens
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