Jacques Lyakov (Jacques in the Garden) – Detailed Biography

Jacques Lyakov is a gardener and a popular YouTuber.

He has over 500K subscribers on his YouTube channel, Jacques in the Garden.

Introduction

Jacques Lyakov, a Bulgarian, grew up in San Diego.

He played a lot of video games growing up.

Even though the young Jacques didn’t garden, he used to be around his mother’s garden, eating tomatoes directly off the plant.

Geology to gardening

After studying Bachelor of Science Earth Sciences, Jacques studied for a M.S. degree at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego from 2015 to 2017.

He started studying for a PhD in Geology from Scripps Institution of Oceanography in September 2018 but dropped out of it to work for Epic Gardening.

Epic Gardening is a gardening business and popular YouTube channel of Kevin Espiritu.

It all started with tomatoes

Jacques was a stranger to gardening prior to 2020.

Thanks to his curiosity and habit of reading books from cover to cover, he picked up John Jeavons’ How to Grow More Vegetables book.

It was the first gardening book that Jacques ever read and it taught him about double digging, preparing the soil and different kinds of plants and systems and provided him with a script to start his garden.

The place which he chose to garden, in 2020, was just a sea of grass with a random cactus and an empty bed.

Jacques filled the whole area with tomatoes, his favourite plant, and stakes and strings.

As the garden worked out, he got hooked on gardening and started growing nonstop. The rich flavour of tomatoes only deepened his interest in gardening.

Jacques was impressed with the taste of homegrown potatoes and onions at Kevin’s garden and started growing them too.

Jacques also built an ecosystem with bugs and bees resembling wilderness to maintain a balance.

After using synthetic chemicals in the garden initially, he switched to organic ones.

Jacques started reading a lot of gardening books and putting them into practice.

Gardening over PhD

Jacques started building his garden and a bigger back garden while studying for a PhD.

As he was a student short on cash, he built a custom chicken coop under $2000 by repurposing various materials.

After watching Kevin’s video, “2 Easy Methods to Revitalize OLD Potting Soil”, in 2020, Jacques DM’d Kevin a few recommendations on improving the soil on Instagram.

Even though Kevin read his message, he was scared to meet him as Jacques had a pumpkin as his profile photo and Kevin assumed him to be an old French man as Jacques is a French name.

However, Kevin met Jacques and learnt that he was his neighbour.

Kevin moved into the Epic Homestead in September 2020 and was struggling to manage the expanding homestead all by himself. So, he put a call out for a garden assistant.

Jacques applied for the part-time position and got the job.

He started losing interest in his PhD at the time.

His love of the outdoors made him choose to do a PhD in geology but he was spending a lot of time in the lab, which he didn’t like.

Kevin bought a warehouse for shipping raised garden beds and birdies beds in 2021 and as he needed help, he offered Jacques a position at Epic Gardening.

Jacques dropped out of his PhD, which was hard for him as he had to contemplate a lot and his family couldn’t understand his decision, and started working at Epic Gardening in June 2021.

Initially, he started working as a Warehouse Manager and used to operate forklifts to drive and ship orders, do Excel work, print labels, shoot and edit videos but later became a Creator and Research Lead.

Having a scientific and research educational background, being curious and the habit of reading greatly helps him as a content creator.

Jacques in the Garden

As Jacques started doing many gardening activities after getting backyard chickens, he decided to document them.

Initially, he started his gardening journal on Instagram where he called himself Garden Hermit before switching to jacquesinthegarden.

Jacques started his YouTube channel Jacques in the Garden on 9 September 2021 and in the same month published his first video.

His experience of tutoring and love for teaching helped him in teaching people gardening after becoming a YouTuber.

Currently, he has over 500K subscribers on YouTube and over 350K followers on Instagram.

Favourite plants

Jacques loves tomatoes, watermelon, shelling peas, thyme and kabocha squash.

He felt the proudest when he harvested the wine cap mushrooms.

Personal life

Jacques is in a relationship with Katrina.

His urban garden is located in San Diego and he lives in that city.

Jacques loves cooking, pizza, outdoors, camping, hiking and DIY projects like wood carving. He enjoys carving utensils.

So, how are you inspired by Jacques Lyakov’s success story?

Share with me in the comment section below.