Top harvest: Two garden creators take us inside their business plans
Q&A: The Lawn Dad questions the exit strategy
Regional TikTok accents, viral water and ranch superfans
Photos by Dylan Wells
Creators grow new garden media
LOS ANGELES — From her front yard in Mid-Wilshire, Carmen Perr — known online as Carmen in the Garden — cultivated an audience of more than 1.5 million followers by sharing her garden-to-table recipes, crops of cucamelons, and baskets of produce she gifts her in-laws.
Across the country in suburban Howard County, Maryland, Christen McCoy — who posts under the handle @verygoodgardening — built an audience of more than 2 million followers through ASMR-like “harvest time” videos as she forages potatoes and plucks strawberries on her property.
Both garden creators are also hauling in brand partnerships and growing revenue. I visited the gardens of Perr and McCoy, two of the top creators in the space, to learn more about how creators have replaced traditional gardening media.
Substack last month launched a Home & Garden category after identifying momentum in the vertical, according to Carrie Marks, the company’s head of lifestyle partnerships. Originally, the garden space was dominated by expert gatekeepers in the gardening departments of magazines like Southern Living, Martha Stewart and Better Homes and Gardens, explained Katie Dubow, the president of Garden Media Group, a PR and marketing firm that represents plant companies. That changed around 15 years ago when bloggers interrupted the scene and there was a rush to send samples to a broader group of hundreds of social media users.
“These creators have really made gardening more accessible,” she said, noting many of the top influencers in the space started gardening as a hobby. At first, “the creators were on this trajectory of kind of turning back to the glossies, just showing this unattainable perfection,” Dubow said. Now, the “creators you see that really take off are the ones that do show a little bit of the gritty.”
On opposite coasts, Perr and McCoy both started gardening as a way to help relieve stress and anxiety. Perr’s content went viral in early 2023, after challenging herself to see what she could cook using only ingredients from her garden. She prepared grilled cabbage and carrots, and replicated the format after identifying that people wanted approachable, attainable tutorials and developed another signature series of the harvest baskets.
McCoy, meanwhile, started on Instagram and moved her attention to TikTok in early 2022 and found she got more engagement when she was the focus of the video. Her first video to blow up with over a million views was a “really big harvest,” a format she said is now the anchor of her channels and that she physically changed her garden to produce more of.
“I started to change the way that I garden so that I could get those big harvests more often and be able to have more content to film,” McCoy said. “We started building more beds because of that too, just to have more space to grow things, growing things that are turning over more,” like squash and beans, as well as fan favorite crops like strawberries. …
The Creator Takeover: How creators flexed their power this week.
🗣️ The regional accents of Tik-Tawk
🍋 Lyrical Lemonade TV released its first slate of shows with Lighthouse Studios
✂️ The Cutting Room Floor inks multiyear deal with Patreon
🏀 The account documenting Knicks fans’ pandemonium
⏳ Behind the AI-generated time-traveling vlogers
💸 Phia unveiled a creator-heavy cap table
💦 Why is everyone posting Loonen water?
🥗 The hottest summer job is ranch ambassador
Creator Q+A
Courtesy of TJ Breil
TJ Breil, known as @the.lawn.dad, worked in mortgage sales until he started posting content of his lawn in April 2023. By November, the Michigan-based creator had secured enough brand partners to quit his day job and pursue content full-time. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Dylan Wells: What are your biggest challenges now as a creator?
TJ Breil: There's an expectation that every single video that you put out has to at least do well. You have to have great engagement, but you also have to post consistently good content. There's never a time where you can try something, because of fear that it might flop. It's just like you always have to one up yourself at all times, and that's extremely stressful.
It's not just your followers who get sick of it, you also get sick of it. There's times where it's just like nobody wants to see me mowing again … Sometimes you just want to plant a garden without the internet watching and making fun of you. … I could literally care less, but the overall feeling of posting something and people just making comments about the plant that you chose is sort of exhausting.
Also, what's the exit strategy? Am I just going to keep on posting videos for 30 more years or 40 more years until I retire? That's not sustainable … What's the end game?
I don't think anybody knows really yet, because who knows where social media is going to be in the next 10 years. Who knows what the next new platform is going to be. … That's a genuine concern, what are we all doing here?
The Platforms
Spotify, Netflix woo Jay Shetty from YouTube in new deal
Meta hires Snapchat’s creator connector in wearables push
Substack’s plans to crack TV
Hackers successfully asked Meta AI to grant access to high-profile Instagram accounts
Close Friends: Content I sent my friends this week.
Combining two of my favorite comfort scroll topics: matcha and baby animals.
New main characters unlocked: the Marquis de Lafayette, an Amsterdam dog walker (biker?), the woman faking a relationship to try to find Nazi loot, and a Play-Doh baddie.
DC viral: this validation of carrying two phones.
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