Nicole Johnsey Burke tours her Nashville kitchen garden in May, showing why you should plant as soon as the last frost passes. She grows kale, snap peas, tomatoes, and fava beans in three zones: a front ornamental area, a central productive bed with mirrored plantings, and a shaded back section. She uses succession planting and inter-cropping to keep beds productive year-round.
Chapters
The biggest mistake most gardeners make is waiting till summer to start their garden. I am only 3 weeks past my last frost, and we're in the middle of a drought, and look at this place! In the next few minutes, I'm going to give you a complete tour of my kitchen garden, show you all the things that have been growing in this space for the last 3 months, so you can plant your garden way earlier in the spring and get tons of harvest before summer ever gets here. I just finished walking 80 people through my garden here in Nashville. They paid $50 for their garden tour ticket, and I thought, This is too good just for them to see it, so I'm going to bring you on the exact tour I just took them. Let's go inside. I'm going to break my garden into 3 different sections, and I'm going to walk you through each part just like I did for everyone on the tour. Along the way, I'm also going to share with you some of my garden design techniques so that your garden can be just as beautiful as mine, and when we get to the back beds, you're going to see how I made some pretty big mistakes this round. So this is my play bed. I've got 2 Corten steel beds at the front and then 2 big planters, and I just kind of have fun in this space. So I've got my kale right here, I've got snapdragons, I've got zinnias, I've got these little strawberries, and then this sorrel that came back from last year. So I let this bed just kind of be whatever I want. If you could peek under things, you'd see some cilantro growing here, some lettuces. I've got some dianthus. I just kind of have fun in these beds. Then these planters, I actually did this for an Instagram reel. It has got some hibiscus, sweet alyssum, some bachelor's buttons. This is just to have fun and be pretty at the front of the garden. Now, one of my design techniques is symmetry. I learned this as I was designing gardens for my clients. I wanted the vegetable garden to be just as beautiful as the ornamental one. Basically, if you put a mirror right down the middle of my garden, you would see an exact reflection on both sides. So it's not the exact same planting, it's a mirror planting. This gives the garden this ornamental feeling even though it's a vegetable garden. It's planted to be productive, it ends up being beautiful too. So here on this side, we have this beautiful Blue Scotch Curled kale. I love this kale. It's gonna grow almost all year in my garden here in Nashville. Even if you're in a cool climate, you can have kale pretty much year round. And I love this plant because it's so structural and architectural. You can really see it kind of mirrored all the way through the garden. It's a great little anchor point for your eyes as you're looking through the garden. Then on the Nicole Arch, we've got sugar snap peas. These are growing right up the flat part of the trellis. These are going to finish up about June. They'll land about here. At that point, I'll cut them at the base, and the tomatoes will take over. Tomatoes are on the outside edges of this trellis, so you end up with this trellis basically being covered from May all the way until the end of the year. Now under here, I had a lot of radishes growing. I just pulled a lot of them. I'll show you one that I let get away from me. Uh-oh, that one is a little too big. But as I pulled these radishes, I've replaced them with things like beans and peppers, basil, some flowers, and I've done the same thing on the other side. We've got the fruiting plants going right down the center of this bed. This is broccoli, and look at these things! They are ready to be harvested. These have been in the garden now for about 2 months, so we've got the fruiting plants right down the center, and then if you peek underneath the broccoli, we've got all this carrot growing from seed, and then we've got our warm season plants coming alongside it: basil, peppers, and marigolds. Those were radishes before, and I've just recently replaced them, so you've got all kinds of plants working together—leafy greens, root crops, and fruit crops—all in one garden. Things like this sage, these came back from last year. They're perennial plants. Once you plant these once, you never have to plant them again, and look how full these things are. Huge, and it's only May, so they're only going to get bigger throughout the summer. When I started my first garden business, I learned the word garden comes from the gard, which literally means enclosure. So an idea I try to bring into every garden design is the idea that a garden is like— it should feel like it's holding you, like it's an outdoor room. So as I designed the center part of my garden, I turned the bed sideways so that no one could walk straight from the front to the back of the garden. You had to kind of meander through, and that's what makes the garden feel more magical. So as you're designing your garden, remember to make people meander, okay? They can't walk all the way through. This first bed is planted directly by seed. This is Gardenary seed. We're growing a ton of romaine lettuce, Calendula is blooming on the edges, and then all this dill is also from seed. There's sugar snap peas that are coming up on the obelisk trellis, and then I've added tomatoes around the edges. If you peek closely, you'll see that there's actually peppers growing in between the romaine lettuce. That means that as soon as the romaine is done, I can pull up the lettuce, I'll have the peppers growing there, and then I can pop in some bush beans later. Now in these two beds, I love having my own beet juice, so I've planted these two beds entirely with beets. I've got fava beans going up the trellis on this side, sugar snap peas on that one. I've also got dill and cilantro growing also from seed, and then I'm trying to do a little magical thing here, and I planted some dahlias in all four corners of these four beds. So come back in June and test me on this one. I'm dreaming of big dahlia flowers surrounding my birdbath. This is a little birdbath I got a few years ago. I love it. I just added this little fountain, solar-powered fountain from Amazon. Let me know if you want the link. And then I planted some lemongrass around the edges. Lemongrass is awesome for mosquito prevention, and also you can do all kinds of— I love Asian cooking, so it's great for Asian flavors. This back bed was radishes, and I just replaced it with summer things like corn and melon. So imagine in a few months, this is going to be huge stalks of corn. There's tomatillos that are going to grow on this trellis, and then I'm going to grow watermelons along the edges. Eventually, it's going to like crowd this entire pathway. You won't even be able to walk in this garden, But even right now, it's looking pretty full. I almost forgot to tell you about my potatoes. Look at these things! So these are whiskey barrels. I put drainage holes in these, but now they actually sell them with holes at like Lowe's or whatever. I filled these things with potatoes, like 5 to 8 potatoes per barrel, and look at these things! I'm gonna have 5 to 10 potatoes for every potato I planted, and I'm pretty excited about this. So potatoes in all 4 whiskey barrels, and we're gonna have a major, major French fry party in like a month, so come back for that one. If your garden is not set up yet and you're walking through this garden thinking, "I want that," then I want to teach you how you can do this exact kind of garden in your own space. I have a workshop where I'm teaching you how to get the setup, the timing, and the planting right in your own garden. You can find a link to watch that workshop right after this video right below. All right, now let's go back to these back beds. I teach in my book Kitchen Garden Revival that you should put your garden on the south side of a tall structure, but Oopsie! That's a really tall structure known as trees, and we're on the north side of that, but I mean, you get the yard you get, you know? So I wanted a really big garden, and I decided these two back beds were just going to be where I could play and show you what's possible in a shaded area. If you can see, there is absolutely no sunshine on these two beds, and yet we have a lot of growth. So we've got the Blue Scotch Curled again. I did plant cauliflower that only so far has produced one head of cauliflower. Hopefully the rest of them will come eventually. We've got fava beans coming up this trellis. Tons of carrots. Look at these carrots, all from seed. Eventually they will become real carrots that we can eat. And then we have these purple mustards that are growing from seed as well, and some zinnias, some sage, some flowers. And then I did the same thing I did on the front two beds. I've got peppers, basil, and beans on the outer edges of these gardens. In the very back, I had asparagus growing. I've had my first asparagus harvest for the spring, and then I've got blackberries growing against this back fence. This is kind of my deer fence, if you will. And then I have to show you what I think is the coolest thing that's happening in the garden right now, so let's go over here. This might be my favorite part of the garden right now. These are my blackberries growing on the Nicole Arch, and they are just about to turn into berries. Everywhere you see a little purple flower is eventually going to be a blackberry, and I personally can't wait because grocery store blackberries are just not cutting it, you know what I mean? So I planted these last year. They kind of grew a little bit, you know the little saying, "First year they sleep," Second year they creep, third year they leap. Well, this is the creeping, and I'm kind of liking it, right? They are flowering. You can see the berries on their way, so in about a month, I'm going to be snacking on blackberries, like just standing here hanging out. I can't wait. Now last January, I tore out my entire garden and started from scratch, and you're probably going to want to see the behind the scenes of how I did just that, and you can watch the whole process, the dirty, dirty process right here.
