Nicole Johnsey Burke (gardener and author) presents a simple “two by three” garden planning method that replaces complex companion-planting charts. She instructs gardeners to first sort plants by frost tolerance (likes frost vs. dislikes frost), then subdivide each group by plant size (large, medium, small), add a combined herbs-and-flowers category for pest protection, and pick one plant from each size category per bed for each season (frost and no-frost) to plan seasonal rotations.
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You will never need a companion planting.
Chart for your garden again after you watch this video. If you're confused or frustrated trying to figure out what plants fit together to grow best in your garden, I'm about to make everything crystal clear with my two by three garden planning method. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nicole Burke and I've been gardening for 15 years. I've gardened in a hot place like Houston, Texas, a cold place like Chicago, Illinois, and now in a mild place like Nashville, Nashville, Tennessee. Over the years, I've written three gardening books and I've helped thousands of people learn how to garden in a much simpler way. And today, I'm going to teach you this two by three method that will make all the difference in the world when it comes to planning out your garden season by season. So instead of looking for a chart online or trying to guess what plants go together, we're going to categorize our plants right here. So the first thing to do is to figure out if plants like frost or do not like frost. So when it comes to growing things in the garden, there are a lot of plants that like frost. They like it when the temperatures are cooler than 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and they don't mind it if temperatures dip into the 30s in Fahrenheit overnight. So you're going to put all the plants that don't mind frost into one category. Then you're going to grab all the plants that don't like frost. These are plants that would absolutely die. They will wilt. They will go to mushrooms if they get touched by temperatures lower than 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And you're going to put all of those into a pile as well.
Now, on this side, just to give.
You an idea, plants that generally like frost are going to be your leafy greens, lettuces, kale, Swiss chard, all those cruciferous vegetables, cauliflower, broccoli, kohlrabi. Then you have root crops, things like beets, carrots, radishes. And then you also have those tiny little lettuces like spring mix and spinach. A lot of those plants, if you think of leafy greens and root crops, those tend to be the types that don't mind frost. They actually like frost. If you're thinking about plants that don't like frost, you want to start considering kind of our quintessential vegetables of summer. Things like tomatoes, peppers, beans, squash, zucchini, and of course, the herb basil doesn't like frost at all. You also might think of some of the fruiting things like cantaloupes and watermelons and pumpkins. Those plants also don't like frost. So once you've divided your plants into these two categories. Loves, frost, doesn't love frost. We're going to take it a step further, and we're going to define these plants by how much space they need in the garden. We're going to put them into three categories here. Large, this is taking up one square foot of space of soil in the garden. Medium, this is taking up about a quarter of a square foot of space in the garden. And small, this is taking up about one ninth of a square foot of space in the garden. So you take all the plants that love frost and you simply divide them by their size. Small, this is going to be your leafy greens, lettuces, arugula, spinach. Medium, these are going to be your root crops. Beets, carrots, onions, and large things like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and cabbages.
Then we do the same thing for.
The plants that hate frost. Up here, we're going to have big things like tomatoes and cucumbers and eggplants. In the middle, we'll have plants like peppers and bush beans. And then in the bottom, we have something kind of surprising. And these are our vining plants that could trail out of the garden. Things like watermelon or zucchini or even cantaloupe. And then you can also have some of your greens that don't mind hot weather. Things like mizuna or arugula. So we've divided our plants by the temperatures they love and by the size they take up in the garden. And then we're going to add one more category for our plants, and those are going to be our herbs and flowers. They're going to all go together in just one category. Believe it or not, you've done all the hard work. Now you just get to pick which plants go together in each and every bed for the time when there's frost and when there's not frost. So I like to make a little envelope like this for each garden bed I'm going to be planting in. Nice little artwork here. This is a snowflake, if you couldn't tell. And this is where I'm going to pick one plant from each category inside the season I'm working in. So when there's a chance of frost, I'm going to have cabbage as my large plant.
Then I'm going to have radishes as my medium sized plant. And then I'm going to have some.
Some spinach as my small plant. Then I'm going to pick one herb.
From this category to put right alongside.
Them for pest protection. And that's going to be parsley. So this right here is a perfect combination for one garden bed. I've got a large, a medium and a small plant. And then I have herbs that I can plant all around the outside of the garden to protect the bed from pest. And that's all I need to do for this first bed for the entire season. So that's bed one. Now I've got eight beds, but I'm going to show you how I'll plan this for just two. So for the second bed I'll do.
The exact same thing. So I'll go in here and I'll find the large plant that I want to grow. In this case I'm going to do Toscano kale.
Then I'm going to pick a medium sized plant. This one's going to be carrots.
And then I'm going to pick a small size plant. And this one is going to be arugula.
Then I'm going to go and find.
An herb that will go alongside these. And in this case I'm going to do cilantro.
So now I've got these plants that all grow in the same season and they all complement each other size wise. And these are all going to go into bed number two. So I could do this over and over again until I filled up all my beds for the season when there is a chance of frost. I know all these plants love frost and I know they'll fit really well together in one bed because they're varying sizes. Then we'll move on to the season when there's no chance of frost. We're going to do the same thing in bed number one, signified by a sunshine. So in this same bed where I planted cabbages and radishes and spinach, I'm.
Going to replace my cabbages with tomatoes.
That will be my large plant.
Then I will replace my radishes with peppers. And then I'm going to replace my.
Spinach with some cantaloupe that's going to grow and trail outside the garden. Or the other option I could do is actually this mizuna. This is a green that will grow when it's hot too.
Then I'm going to find an herb. In this case I'm going go for oregano and I'll put oregano around the.
Edge of the bed to last me through the summer. Months. So here I have my entire plan for the same bed I planted in the cool times. Now, in the warm times, I have a plan of how I'll replace all those plants for plants that love frost. Finally, I'll do the same thing for bed number two.
So I'm going to replace the large kale and put some eggplants there in its place. Then I'll replace the carrots with some beans. And then I'm going to replace the edge of the bed with some melons. Or I can go for one of.
The greens, like arugula that doesn't mind the hot weather.
And then finally, I'm going to grab.
An herb like sage, and I'll plant that sage all around the outside of the bed. So again, this gives me a large, a medium, and a small plant, as well as an herb for pest protection that can fill up one entire bed during the season when there's no chance of frost. Now, this is the method that I outline in all of our seasonal planners. I don't just plan the garden for two seasons. I actually plan it for four. Cold, cool, warm, and hot. And I teach you exactly what to do each and every day of the entire season inside our four seasonal planners. So I'm going to link those right below this video, as well as an incredible free resource, which is our gardenary calendar where you put in two dates for your whole year, and then we give you all the planting dates that you need from those two dates. Now, if you want to watch and learn how I take all these plants and put them into the garden in a way that gives me tons of food, tons of beauty, and lots of pest protection, you should watch this video about my planting method next.
