Sproutwell in Hudson Valley Table Magazine, June 2025
Sproutwell was featured in the June 2025 issue of Hudson Valley Table. This four-page spread dives into how the company came to be, what inspires Kristen’s garden designs, and why raised beds don’t have to be boring.
A full transcript of the article is below.
The Garden Guru
With an eye toward striking design, Kristen Svorka crafts bespoke edible gardens throughout the Hudson Valley.
By Deborah Skolnik
If you love to grow veggies, then you probably have an in-ground plot or some raised beds in your yard. But have you ever felt embarrassed by all that bent chicken wire and old lumber? Or aggravated because the sweet potato vines are strangling the tomatoes? You don’t have to settle for ungainly chaos; there are ways to garden both beautifully and bountifully. Kristen Svorka, founder of Sproutwell, an edible garden design company, can make the magic happen for you.
“I founded Sproutwell a couple of years ago,” Svorka says. “I moved from Brooklyn to Stony Point and suddenly I had two acres of property, and I wanted to learn how to grow vegetables.” After honing her skills through research, classes, and volunteering at gardens, she began to offer advice to other NYC expats with aspirations of standing amid rows of rainbow-colored chard and breakfast radishes.
From there, it seemed like a logical step to start Sproutwell.
Svorka pays house calls to customers throughout the Hudson Valley and New York City, and after surveying their property and listening to their wish list for a growing space, she gets to work. “I design and install gardens that consist of plants you can eat—vegetables and herbs, and in some cases edible flowers, depending on the client’s interest,” she says. The gardens are frequently made from local cedarwood or, in some cases, stone. “I like to pull in materials that are used on the house or elsewhere on the site, so that it looks like the garden has been there for as long as the home,” Svorka explains. She also factors in sun exposure and looks for opportunities to draw water to the garden from the house through a drip irrigation system. Costs can vary widely depending on factors, such as whether the garden will be planted with seeds or seedlings, the density of the plantings, and the materials used.
Many customers also ask for native meadows to attract pollinators, which is a win-win situation. “It’s great in general for the environment, and you also have an amazing symbiotic relationship with vegetable gardens. You want pollinators and beneficial insects in your vegetable garden as well,” she explains. She recently became certified as an installer for a wildflower mat wholesaler that offers native meadow seeds embedded in sod. “It gets everything very quickly composed if you were to just scatter seeds on the ground,” she says.
Before becoming a garden designer, Svorka worked as an interior architect and managed a wide range of projects, from residential interiors to large-scale settings, including designing a new corporate headquarters in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards and working on a renovation for the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Given her experience and perspective, it’s not surprising she feels a garden should be both functional and aesthetically pleasing.
“The switch in between my past career and my present one is working closely with clients to bring their visions to reality,” she says. “I think a lot of times there’s not necessarily an aspiration that food gardens should be beautiful. They’re kind of relegated to the functional and pushed out of sight.” She endeavors to create growing spaces that are the exact opposite: the striking highlight of any patch of land.
“I specialize in raised beds. I work a lot with fabricators that I knew when I worked as an interior architect. They’re trained in making furniture and beautiful millwork,” she explains. In collaboration with these fabricators, she designs bespoke garden beds that harmonize with the surrounding landscape as well as the house. “I really make my gardens so they’re meant to be noticed,” she says. If clients prefer to design their gardens on their own, however, she’ll help them do that, too.
Of course, it would not be for nothing if the plants inside the finished gardens are overcrowded, under-fertilized, or non-productive. For that reason, Svorka explains to clients which plants to put in, and when and where. (Tall vegetable plants should be planted to the north, for example, so they don’t cast shade on shorter ones.) She’ll even procure the seedlings if people want, either ones she has grown from local growers. “I’m a big fan of Hudson Valley Seed Company [in Accord],” she says.
Svorka also gives her clients detailed, month-by-month instructions to follow throughout the growing season. “In spring, my clients get seed schedules that tell them when to feed, transplant, and harvest their plants. I also remind them of when to add compost to the soil, or fertilizer, or perform other tasks,” she says. In addition, she checks in with clients to see if they have questions or need additional support.
And how about uninvited visitors such as birds, deer, and chipmunks, who treat gardens like drive-through fast-food restaurants? Svorka takes their pest desires into account in her designs. “I think growing in raised beds helps a little bit, and obviously there are different heights of them to choose from, for the comfort of the gardener,” she says. She also recommends putting translucent covers on raised beds to keep pests out, sometimes she does her own garden for much of the season. “I’m personally working on some mesh cover cases that are quite attractive,” she shares.
It’s all knowledge that Svorka has acquired from a variety of sources. “I learned some things through trial and error. I definitely spent a handful of years watching YouTube videos, and getting very frustrated with the fact that even mainstream gardening is unnecessarily complicated and not confidence-boosting,” she recalls. To learn more in-depth strategies, in 2022 she enrolled in a farm in Cold Spring as part of a vegetable team. “I joined the farmers and basically did everything they did,” she says.
Later, she enrolled in the New York Botanical Garden’s professional horticultural program, where she continues to take classes.
The largest project Svorka has done to date is a garden in Southbury, CT. “The client had a beautiful, nicely established piece of property, but with all ornamental plantings. They had the vision of having a food garden, but didn’t really have any additional space to do it,” she says. “So I worked closely with them to identify the types of plants that they wanted to grow and then figured out ways to integrate smaller edible plants into the ornamental landscape. It’s been a nice reminder that edible plants can be interwoven with more decorative plantings.”
Svorka has also helped clients grow low-maintenance plants that they love to cook with, especially ones that can be harvested on a regular and ongoing basis or are perennial. “That way, you’re not building your garden from scratch each season,” she says. And for those who need a little guidance cooking what they grow: “On Instagram (@hellosproutwell), I show how fun it is to go outside, harvest something from your garden, bring it in, and prepare food with it.”
Svorka believes gardening should be joyful, and that edible gardens are growing trend. “I think people now have increased awareness of sustainability, and eating organic, and are acting on that loudly. I recently spoke to a farmer who said, ‘If you have a garden, you have an exciting, beautiful science experiment in your backyard.’ I think it should engender some feelings of curiosity, wonder, and excitement.”