In this instructional video, Nicole Johnsey Burke walks viewers through creating a beginner‑friendly container herb garden using a large whiskey‑barrel‑style planter. She begins by emphasizing the importance of choosing a container at least 2 ft wide and 1 ft deep, then shows how to add mobility with three casters, drill pilot holes, and bolt them in place. She covers preparing the planting medium by layering yard compost, a bag of organic potting mix, and additional compost, while using burlap to cover drainage holes. Nicole selects affordable herbs (rosemary, thyme, sage, mint, basil, parsley, cilantro, dill) from stores like Trader Joe’s, and explains a strategic planting layout: low‑water‑need herbs around the dry edges, high‑water‑need basil in the moist center, and medium‑water‑need herbs (parsley, cilantro, dill) in the intermediate zone. She gives practical tips on spacing, splitting basil clusters, and ensuring mint stays contained. Watering guidance focuses on delivering about 1 inch per week to the center, monitoring moisture with a finger, and avoiding over‑watering. Throughout, she shares cost estimates, troubleshooting advice, and references a deeper garden‑workshop video and a “20 container garden mistakes” video for further learning.
Chapters
If you want to start a garden but you don't know where to start, today's video is for you. Over the next few minutes, I'm going to walk you through the step-by-steps of a garden project that anyone can do, whether you've got a really small space or just a little bit of sun, a small garden budget, and no gardening experience. This project was literally made for you. If you're ready to create a beautiful garden you can harvest from all season long, let's go inside. The biggest mistake that will absolutely ruin your container garden is not buying a big enough container. The plants, they need enough room to spread their roots out. You need enough soil inside the container so it doesn't dry out or lose its nutrients too quickly. So if I'm buying a container, I'm looking for one that's at least 2 feet wide and 1 foot deep, and this is one I just happened upon at Home Depot. So these whiskey barrels are not called whiskey barrels anymore; they're called planters because Home Depot has gotten all the drainage holes already drilled. I used to have to do this work myself, and right now, at least at my store, they're selling for about $70. Now you can see these are over 2 feet wide, and they're actually 2 feet deep as well, so this is the perfect size to grow some seriously healthy plants without having to take up a lot of space. All right, I definitely want to put the container on casters because I have 4 in my garden, and I literally can't move them. They weigh so much. If you think about it, you've got the container that is probably going to weigh 30 or 40 pounds. Each cubic foot of soil is another 40 pounds, so probably one of these barrels is going to be 80 to 100 pounds, so we're going to put 3 casters instead of 4. My first option is this one, which seems a little pricey. It's $15, so I would spend about $45 to get all 3. I was thinking about this cheaper one, but when I checked it out, the bolts or nuts or anything like that, so it's going to end up being $15 anyway. I'm going to go with 3 of these and hope that it works. I'm going to get just 1 bag of soil. This is 2 cubic feet, so it's going to fill up a lot of the container. Just going to fill the base with some natural organic materials from my yard, and then I'll put soil right on top. One of my favorite places to buy herbs for my garden is at a store like Trader Joe's. They have all these organic varieties, and they are such a steal of a deal. These plants are just $2.49. They're organic, they're healthy. I just bought some from a nursery for $5.99 that are the same size. So I'm going to get mint, I'm going to get thyme, I'm going to get some Italian parsley, I think they've also got some sage here. They've got some rosemary, and then they even have this huge basil if you want to take it to the next level. This one has like 10 plants in one. It is a steal of a deal. I can get all these herbs for less than $15. It's time to put this container garden together, so the first thing to do is drill holes for your casters. So I'm making sure that my drill bit is the same size as these bolts that are going to go into the casters, and I think I got it right. Now, I'm only doing 3 casters, so what I've done is started some little pilot drill holes. There's 4 drainage holes in this container already, so I'm kind of using those as a guide, and what I'm doing is starting to drill a couple little pilot holes here. I'm just going to go straight through. Now it's time to see if I did them correctly and these casters can fit into this container. I think it works. We're gonna make it work. Not gonna lie, it's a very annoying part of the process. It takes forever to get these things. Trust me on this one, do the painful things in your garden when you're setting it up. I talk about this in my garden workshop. If you haven't watched it, I'll put a link to it right below this video. All right, now we're just going to bolt these on. Not that I think they're moving because it took us a lot of muscle to get these things in. The next step is to cover up the drainage holes, so we just want to be sure we're not losing soil on the patio or porch, wherever this container is placed. I like to use burlap. It's a more natural alternative to weed barrier cloth, and you can just take some, cut it up, and then I like to double it up because it does have holes in it, so you just want to be sure all the holes get covered between your layering. and you've got all the drainage holes covered. Water can come out, but no soil. I'm going to grab a little bit of compost from my Jora composter to put in the base because I did buy one bag of soil, but I'm not sure it's going to be enough. So I'm just going to grab— this stuff has been sitting pretty much all winter. It is looking nice. We're going to take the compost and just pour straight in. See how much that fills up? And then we'll put our bagged mix on top of that. Now I'm going to fill this up with this organic raised bed and potting mix from Kellogg's. It might not be enough to fill the whole thing, but we'll see. Save this for the top. We're going to add a little bit more compost, and we'll top it off with this. I'm just going to give this a little mix, and we are ready to plant. So I'm going to plant the edges of the container first, and I like to plant along the edges the plants that need the least amount of water. The edges of your bed, of any container, are the ones that are going to dry out fastest, so you want to put your low-watering-need plants on the edges. In this case, I'm going to do rosemary on opposite sides of this container. Rosemary is in the same plant family as thyme, and thyme is also a low-water-need plant. Then we're going to put thyme here in the front. Then we have another thyme, same plant family, both in the Lamiaceae plant family or the mint plant family. We're going to put that on either corner. Then another plant that is in the same plant family is sage, and sage also is a low-water-need plant. This one has a little baby basil in there, which is kind of funny. Okay, so we'll also put sage here along the edge. All right, now I know some people are going to get a little upset about this, but I am going to include mint in my planter. Mint is in the same plant family as these other plants. Mint is a vigorous spreader, so it loves to spread its roots along the bottom of a container, and it will eventually start to take up more space in this container, but it's contained. It's not in the ground. It's not going to kill all these other plants, and I found that I can grow all these plants together in one season without the mint taking over the pot. So now we've got our low-water-need plants all along the exterior. Now we're going to plant up the middle of the container. and here is where I'm going to put the plant that needs the most water. In this case, it's basil. So basil is also in the Lamiaceae plant family, but it is an annual rather than a perennial, so it actually is a higher water need plant. Now this, if you can see, is like 10 or 20 basil plants, so I'm not going to divide them into every tiny little plant because what will happen is they'll struggle a little bit, but what I do like to do is break them into half. So I'm going to take these and break it into two parts, and that at least gives these a little bit more space to spread out and grow. So we'll plant these back here, and these are going to be right in the center. This is because this part of the container is going to get the most amount of water. That's where the water will pool for your container, so it's the perfect place to put your highest water need plant. And now we're going to take this other one. This one needs a little bit of water. It's been indoors a little too long, but we're going to get it watered, so don't worry. So we'll split this one up, and we're going to plant it on either side of this middle. Oh my gosh, this container smells so good. So put this one on this side and then this one on the other. This is going to give us a basil tower. Right in the middle of the container, so they've all got enough room, giving them a little bit more root room. They don't need a lot of root room. They have very small roots, but it is nice to separate them out. Then finally, we're going to put our medium water needs. So this is the one herb that I found that is not in the Lamiaceae plant family. This is parsley. It's actually in the carrot plant family, and it has mild, medium water needs, So we're going to put this in the in-between. If you imagine this like a bullseye, so we've got lowest water needs around the outside, highest water needs in the middle, and then average water needs will be around the middle line. So we'll put parsley here. You could also put dill, you can put cilantro. Those are two other great plants to fit right in between, and I'm basically making sure that I'm in between where these border plants are so that it doesn't crowd too bad. Parsley will benefit from a little bit of shade, and that basil is going to give it to it because parsley is more of a cool weather plant. So what you're going to end up with is basil kind of shading, towering over this parsley. You could also add dill and cilantro, and then you're going to have these plants on the edge. These are the ones that love the sun, don't mind drying out. Those are going to go along the edges. I just went in and realized I had a few little neglected cilantro seedlings, from my soil blocker, and so I'm just going to add these right along the edge on that same little section with the parsley. This is an easy container to water. You just want to water the center of the container. You don't want it too wet. You want to give it at least 1 inch of water a week, and then just check the moisture level every few days. The basil is going to tell you when it's gotten too dry, and that's the first thing you want to water. These plants along the exterior, they don't need a lot of water, and they definitely don't want a soaking wet container. So water the basil, let the water get to the outside plants, and then just monitor it with your finger. If it feels dry to the touch, add a little bit of water, but never have it soaking. This is where the fun begins. You can move this container into the sun, out of the sun. Once you've got your container planted, there are 20 container garden mistakes that you want to make sure you don't make, and you can watch that video right here.
