4 Summer 2025 | edibleseattle.com BOOKSHELF A HAPPIER HOUR Drink Your Garden encourages you to elevate your drinks in this garden-to-glass guide WORDS BY EDIBLE SEATTLE | 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
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