How to Turn Your Lawn Into A Garden (In 5 Steps)

If you're dreaming of turning your yard into a beautiful garden, you're going to want to watch this video from start to finish because just a few years ago, this space, it was nothing but boring grass, and in a few months, we turned it into this gorgeous vegetable garden. We recorded every single step of the process, and today I'm going to teach it to you so that you can create the same transformation in your space. There's only 5 steps to go from grass to garden, So let's get started. Step 1 is going to save you so much money. Before you buy a single thing for your garden, take some time to think about the design and the layout. I first met Connie, my client, right here in this space, and we looked at 4 things before picking the design of the garden. I'm going to walk you through each one of those. So first step is you want to look at the sun. Your garden's growth is directly tied to how much sunlight you can get on the garden. So if you're in the Northern Hemisphere, you want to find where south is. Here in Connie's yard, it is right there. That is going to determine how much shade you're going to get on sun, and you can see here in the middle of the summer, early in the morning, almost the entirety of the garden is covered with sun except for this little part because of her chimney top right there on the south side. So find where the sunlight is. Watch the sun in your space over a period of time. There's even some apps you can use to find out the sunlight. We'll link those right below. Once you know how much sunlight is in your space, then you want to find proximity to water. Connie's water spigot is right there on that wall, and that's what we use to link up the irrigation. I'll show you about that in another step. Then you want to think about accessibility. Accessibility, how easily you can get to the garden from your living space. Connie's kitchen is right there, so she can literally come down the steps from her kitchen and be in her kitchen garden. That is goals. You do not want the garden really far away from your kitchen because you want to be able to use it in your kitchen. So just a few steps away is the goal. And then finally, we want to think about aesthetics, how the garden ties into the rest of your home. I've been designing gardens since 2015, and I've learned that the way a garden looks beautiful is tying it to the existing structures of your home. So paying attention to where gates are, where fences are, where the lines of your home are. So here in Connie's space, we looked at this whole yard and tried to make it so the garden would feel like it was made for this space, like it was here from the beginning. And you want to think about that before you buy a single thing. And then you're done with step 1. Now all these things are inside my first book, Kitchen Garden Revival. It is going to give you all the step-by-step to set up your garden, so I'll link that right below this video too. Step number 2 is to prep your space. This takes 4 different steps to make it happen. The first step is to create a border for your garden. You can do this with You can do this with steel edging, but you want to mark off the entire space where your garden is going to be. Next, you want to clear the space. We're getting rid of everything that would be in the way of the garden growing. This includes sod, weeds, bushes, ornamentals, trees— anything that's in the way of the garden space, it's got to go. Next, you want to level the space. You don't have to level the spaces outside of the garden area, but everything inside needs to be on the same plane so that when your raised beds are in the space, they're all nice and level with one another. You can adjust it a little bit when you get to step 3 and 4, but This is an important time to get your space leveled out. And then finally, you want to cover it. You can use a ground cover here. You could use any kind of mulch, or you could use my favorite, which is gravel. Here in this garden space, we filled the pathways with gravel. This is a nice clean look. It drains fast. It's easy to walk on, and it prevents the raised beds from deteriorating because they're sitting on a dry surface pretty much all the time because the gravel drains so easily. Once you've prepped your space, you are ready for step number 3. If you like videos like this, you should definitely subscribe to the Gardening channel, and when you do, we have a free gift: Gardenary planting plans that we will deliver right to your email inbox. As soon as you subscribe to our channel, take a little screenshot to show us you're subscribed. Send an email to hello@gardenary.com with your screenshot and the subject line YouTube subscribed. As soon as you do that, we're going to email you 17 Gardenary planting plans so that your garden looks just as beautiful as hers. Step number 3 is installing your structures. For a Gardenary kitchen garden, we use 2 main structures: raised beds and The raised beds have to come first. I talk about lots of different materials you can use for your raised beds. You can use cedar or a long-lasting wood. You can use stone, or you can use steel. For this garden, we chose to go with cedar. Once you've picked your material, it's also a good time to think about the layout of your garden. We discussed this in step 1, but this is when it really comes to life. I line out 5 different designs that I think make for beautiful raised bed kitchen gardens, going from a small border garden that's just one raised bed to this design, which is the biggest one. This is called a formal potager. I like to joke that it's so big we had to call in the French language to describe it. So a formal potager is actually 4 L-shaped beds that all come together to create somewhat of an outdoor room where when you walk into it, you feel enclosed. You feel like you're in this special space, almost like it's a room, but it's outside. So once you've locked down your design, you want to think about how you want to create your raised beds. You can make your beds from scratch, or you can order kits online. We have all these shapes, including L-shaped beds, inside the Gardenary shop. For this particular garden, we actually had beds custom-built because these beds were so large, and it was such a unique size and shape. Once you get your beds in place, you want to be sure they're going to last as long as possible, so we add an eco-stain to our cedar beds. This is a whey material, and it basically patinas the wood and kind of makes it like petrified so that it doesn't absorb water, and it lasts a really long time. These beds now are 2 and a half years old, and they are looking amazing. So once you preserve those beds, it's time to add in your trellises. We use 3 different styles of trellises: arches, obelisks, and panels, and you put them into the garden space to maximize your growing space and also to create some of the magic that makes it feel like you're in this outdoor room. Again, you can make your own trellises, or you can buy kits. We have kits for all 3 different kinds of trellises. This is the Nicole Arch Trellis, and then we have obelisk and panels too, and I'll link those right below this video. You want to be sure the trellises are in place before you move on to step 4 so that everything is ready to go and you don't have to retrofit anything. Step number 4 is adding soil and irrigation. You could skip all the other steps, but if you skip this one, the whole thing's over. Soil is the most important. I use a 1-0-3 blend that I created for my clients way back in 2016. It's topsoil, compost, and coarse sand with some earthworm castings mixed in. Very easy to make. We have a whole video on my soil recipe. If you want to check that out after this. So we bring in lots of soil, and we do fill the beds all the way up with soil. We know there's lots of other things you could put at the bottom, but the goal is for the soil not to drop or degrade too quickly. So we start with great soil, and then we just add to the top as we need to every year. Then it's time to connect the irrigation. What we did here is we connected to a spigot. We put a timer on the spigot. We ran that line underneath the garden space, and then we brought up lines into every single one of these beds. This then allowed us to run drip lines on the of the soil for the entire garden space. Now drip is very different than spray heads. I highly recommend drip for vegetable gardens because it gets all the water right to where those vegetable plants need it, which is at the soil and the root level. Drip is going to be so much slower though, so you need to be sure that you set your water to run longer than you would a spray head because a spray head gives you gallons per minute. Drip is going to give you gallons per hour. So we line these up so that the irrigation lines run about one every 12 to 15 inches, so you get nice coverage every time you run the water. Once the soil and the irrigation are in place, we are finally ready for the most magical part, and that's step 5. Before we get into step number 5, I've gotten so many DMs from gardeners like you who've said, I love what you do for a living. How could I make this what I do too? So if that's you, you might want to check out our Garden Coach program. I teach gardeners all over the world how to take our system and create their own garden coach businesses out of it. You can apply to become a Gardenary coach. I'll put that link right below this video. Now let's get to my favorite part, which is the plants. The week we were putting this garden in, it was extremely rainy. The team was working, getting the garden going. It was a big mud pit here. The video team and I, we headed to the plant shop to do my favorite thing, which is buying hundreds of plants. We bought lots of flowers, lots of herbs. We also bought some fruiting plants, which at that time were things like broccoli, cauliflower, even some romanesco. And then we bought some leafy greens that are big, like big kale plants. We also bought a few lettuce plants, I think. Then the rain finally cleared for us to have our planting When I plant out a kitchen garden, I start first with the border. That's when we place flowers and herbs all along the edges of the beds. This creates a natural first line of defense for your vegetable garden. The herbs and flowers protect your plants from pests and disease. Next, we went right down the middle and planted our biggest fruiting plants, so we did things like cabbages, cauliflower, romanesco, and broccoli. Right beside that, we started to line up some root crops, so I believe we planted some onion starts. And then we also planted things like beets and carrots by seed. And then finally on the edges, we added our leafy greens, some by plant and some by seed— things like spinach and lettuce and spring mix, arugula, anything that she could grow quickly as a leafy green, we added it there by seed. We also put some sugar snap peas by seed on the trellises so that she could get some fruiting plants growing up the trellis before she even got close to summer. Now this has become one of my favorite places to go in my city to come over and see this garden growing. It's now been growing for 2 and half years. We came back to the garden just a few months after we set it up and filmed an entire video on my planting method and why it works so well. So if you want to see what this space looked like just a few months after we did all that planting, you can watch the whole thing right here.