Drink Your Garden encourages you to elevate your drinks in this garden-to-glass guide
IMAGES BY RYLEA FOEHL
Picture this: You’re lounging in a backyard garden. It’s a late summer afternoon. The sun is out but not punishing; there’s a light breeze that keeps you cool. The air smells of warm earth, and flowers. Music is playing somewhere nearby. Someone hands you a glass, cold with condensation. Ice cubes clink musically against the glass as you take a long sip. A zing of lemon on your tongue, but other flavors coalesce—is it rhubarb, lilac, strawberries? You take another sip, and another. Life is good. You smile off into the middle distance as the screen fades and credits roll.
While no cookbook can guarantee life will suddenly become a scene in a Nora Ephron movie, with Drink Your Garden: Recipes, Stories and Tips from the Simple Goodness Cocktail Farm, the romanticized garden party ideal seems suddenly attainable, even if you might not have a garden.
Drink Your Garden is the first book from sisters Belinda Kelly and Venise Cunningham, the minds behind Simple Goodness Sisters drink syrups and their flagship Simple Goodness Soda Shop in Wilkeson, and is the natural extension of both projects.
The book begins with the sisters’ background as lifelong Washingtonians, raised in Kent by a cadre of can-do personalities, farmers, entrepreneurs and consummate hosts. One sister goes on to build a mobile cocktail company, one sister takes up farming—it’s easy to see how it was only a matter of time before the two worlds met. They launched Simple Goodness Sisters in 2018, with their three flagship drink syrups: Rhubarb Vanilla Bean, Marionberry Mint and Huckleberry Spruce Tip. The soda shop followed soon after in 2020.
Kelly and Cunningham frame their book around their values: they favor connection and seasonality over convenience, and deeply value the time and skill it takes to grow food yourself. Both are avid gardeners, so while many of the recipe ingredients can be purchased (from your local farmers market or co-op), the book is full of tips and ideas for your own garden, even if your garden is just a windowsill.
“An understanding of the patience, hard work and skills needed to produce food,” writes Kelly, “will make anyone appreciate a plate of food or a drink differently.”
Sections run through what Cunningham and Kelly keep in their own “cocktail gardens” and then break down the ingredients into different layered components of a delicious drink. They explain how to make your own syrups, cordials and shrubs, as well as the difference between hot and cold infusions, tinctures and bitters. There’s the sense of their sisterly guidance, encouraging creative flavor layering and waste reduction, while sharing the best of what’s worked for them. The sisters call their philosophy “whole-animal bartending”—the idea that any fruit, herb or vegetable you use can be used entirely. Their example is using citrus juice for a syrup, peels for a garnish, pith and pulp for a shrub.
Beyond the guidance, the recipes welcome us to make our own attempts. Some are expected, like a simple strawberry syrup, or are classic flavor combinations like cranberry and rosemary. Some are intriguing, like a recipe for buzz button gin—using the curious buzz button flower, also known as a “toothache plant”—which creates a fun numbing effect in drinks—or the kale and chard vodka, which is just offbeat enough to make us want to try it. (The sisters suggest a “Garden Gibson” with a pickled chive blossom to let the spirit shine through.) There are plenty of cocktails, but non-alcoholic drinks abound as well—the sisters’ philosophy is for everyone, and any occasion.
Kelly and Cunningham take us on a tour through their garden in every season as the recipes progress. In spring, the delicate lilac and woodsy spruce tips make spritzes, an unexpected bumper crop of fennel leads to necessary invention in an attempt to use as much of the plants as possible. “When life gave us a fennel lawn,” writes Kelly, “we made fennelcello.”
Fall is laden with apples, but also brown butter-washed vodka and chili peppers. Winter has the anticipated toddies and Christmas punches, but also some intriguing cocktails like the “Heart Beet” using a beet shrub, and the “Figgy Pudding Fizz.”
Every recipe is approachable, and encourages experimentation, while living up to the Simple Goodness brand by keeping the recipes simple, and the expectation joyful. And while we can’t live all the time in the rose-colored world of Drink Your Garden, we can certainly plant our gardens with our bar carts in mind, in anticipation of a “happier hour” in the future.
To get the party started, Kelly and Cunningham have graciously included the following recipes for us to make a “Southside” (page 32), a jammy, spirit-forward cocktail that plays like a mojito, but presents like a daiquiri. To make it, you’ll need the sisters’ Blackberry and Mint syrup, and their Mojito Berry garnish—both of which can use that summer explosion of blackberries in every hedgerow, and the mint we can’t seem to keep contained in our gardens this time of year. Cin cin!
DRINK YOUR GARDEN: Recipes, Stories, and Tips from the Simple Goodness Cocktail Farm
By Belinda Kelly and Venise Cunningham
Countryman Press, W.W. Norton & Company, 2025
