Nicole Johnsey Burke (host) warns new gardeners against the common error of rushing their garden setup. Drawing on personal experience and coaching thousands of clients, she advises slowing down to answer three key questions—why (purpose), where (location/sun/access), and how much (budget/time)—and recommends doing the hard, important work up front (her “do the worst first” prescription) to avoid wasted effort and expense.
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The biggest mistake that new gardeners make is not what you think. My name is Nicole Johnsey Burke. I've helped thousands of gardeners fix their gardens over the last 10 years. And I can trace almost all their problems back to this one thing. So if you're thinking about starting a garden, if you've even had the slightest inkling that you might start a garden anytime soon, don't you dare grab that shovel until you watch this video. I don't just know about this huge mistake from watching thousands of other gardeners. I know it because I made it myself about 14, 15 years ago. I had been dreaming and thinking about starting a garden for a few years, and I was with my kids. I have four kids, and at the time, they were all little, and we were at my mom's and dad's house in Mississippi. My mom had just started a garden, and I was so inspired. So on my way home, I think it was the middle of end of June, I called Jason, and I say, jason, when I get home, can we please start our garden? I just. I want to have it this summer. He's like, sure. I get home, it's the fourth of July weekend. He finally has a little bit of time off, and we just go for it. We dive in. Our friend loans us his tiller. We're renting, by the way. We till up the edge of this yard that we're renting, we just plant. We go to Home Depot, grab a bunch of different seeds, anything we can find, really, and just stick it all in the soil, come back later with some hay, straw, cover it up. Let's just say the results were less than optimal. Yes, we got the garden in. That is a fact. But was it actually a garden? Debatable. A garden is something that actually produces. And I'm not quite sure we got anything. Maybe a few potatoes and a handful of bush beans. Funny thing is, as soon as I started my garden business, fast forward a few years, I had people calling me who had done almost the exact same thing. It's a pattern you may have seen yourself. You dream about it, you dream about it, you think about it, you think about it, you talk about it, you talk about it, you dream about it some more. And then you wake up on a Saturday morning and you're like, today's the day we are putting in the garden. So you run down to Home Depot, grab some random supplies, buy the cheapest materials you can find, and then come home, pull it all together, give yourself a high five at the end of the day, because Boom, you've got a garden. This is the mistake. This is the biggest mistake. And I can sum up this mistake in just three words. Rush the setup. That's the biggest mistake that most gardeners make. They rush the setup. They're dreaming and talking and thinking about it, and then all of a sudden, they just pull it all together and rush it at the very start. So I have a way to fix this, all right? To fix this, this mistake so that it doesn't happen to you. And it's by taking time, slowing down during this dreaming, thinking, talking period and answering three key questions. So the first question you want to slow down and ask yourself is, why? Why do I want a garden in the first place? And you may think, duh, Nicole, because plants. But it's more complex than that, believe it or not. You want to start to figure out what is the key thing that's driving you, what's most important for you when it comes to this garden. A couple of examples of reasons why people have started garden that I've talked to over, you know, all these years. One is productivity. This is probably the most popular one. Everyone wants to buy less groceries and have food that actually tastes good, that they know where it came from and everything that happened to it, from seed to harvest. So productivity, that may be your goal, and if it is, that needs to impact the way you set up your garden, the way you plant it. Another one is beauty. Some people just want a beautiful thing to look at. They want to be able to sit outside and just go, yes, that is beautiful. I am stunned by the beauty of that garden. That may be your goal. Other goals are things like sustainability, taking care of the wildlife, creating a wildlife habitat, creating a place to have events and special moments, parties and little, you know, wine time or lunchtime or tea time out in nature with your friends, your family, people you care about. Another thing is just for education, a lot of us, myself included, I didn't grow up learning about where my food came from. And so for me, a lot of times, I'm most motivated to grow plant because I just want to see how it grows. So don't rush the setup. Don't go out and buy materials and put your garden in before you take a little bit of time to ask yourself the why, and then it's time to ask yourself the next question, which is going to be the where. Now, this is also something we rushed so much in that first garden, and it's become the key thing that I work with clients in our kitchen Garden Academy course. I Help people really slow down and think through this. If you think about real estate, we've moved quite a bit. So I've learned this the hard way, that the same house in, in two parts of town, they could be worth vastly different amounts of money, right? So on this side of town, very expensive. This side of town, a great deal. And that's true for you with your garden as well. So the garden that you may rush and set up, yes, you have the instant gratification that it's there, but it might actually be in the worst part of your yard. Maybe it's under a tree, maybe it's in the line where it can't be protected at all from wildlife. Maybe it's going to have the least amount of sun, or it's just really inaccessible to you. So figuring out where to put your garden is literally the second most important question you've got to ask. And you need to slow down. You need to not just plop the garden in your very first idea of where it should belong. You should take some time, do some sun mapping, figuring out where the sunniest spot is in your yard, and then also thinking through just traffic flow and how you can get to the garden the fastest. The final question you've got to answer, and this is super important, is the how much? The how much question is the most important. Because here's the thing, and I've learned this the hard way, you should give yourself the nicest garden you can afford. The cheap pay twice. Okay, I have paid twice. I have paid thrice. That first garden that we set up, we had to completely undo it. So at the moment, we thought we were saving money, but we were actually losing money. Every single dime we spent to set up that garden, no matter how cheaply we did it, we had to spend, spend that again and more because we had to undo all that we had set up in the first place. And so figuring out your budget, it doesn't matter what your budget is, it could be a little, it could be a lot. But once you get that number of how much you want to spend in the garden, you should get the best garden you can afford for that money. You shouldn't try to get the cheapest materials that you can because you want to create something that will last and you want to, like, maximize your budget. So figure out how much money you want to spend. And then you also want to do some budgeting for other things, like how much time, how much time do you want to put into the install of the garden? And then how much time do you think you're going to put into the garden once it's set up, having that budget conversation, whether it's with yourself and your bank account or with your spouse or partner, anybody in your family, having that before you go all in, before you go to the store? Because once you get to the store, you're going to be distracted, you're going to be confused, you're going to be looking at what's on on sale and what bargains you can get. So you want to do the how much conversation before you put the garden in. So all this sums up the why, the where, and the how much. These come into an equation that I present all the time to my students. And it's called doing the worst first. I learned the hard way. I try to teach you, and I'm hoping you're watching this before you put your garden in. The way we turn this thing around is we do the worst first. We don't rush the setup. Instead, we slow down, we answer these three questions, and then we do the hard things. Things right away. Here's how this fixes it. So when you rush the setup, when you put your garden in real fast, you get that instant gratification, that end of the weekend feeling of like, yes, the garden is in. But then reality sets in and your soil wasn't right. You didn't pick the right location, it's not sunny enough, things fall apart. You realize that was actually cheap for a reason, because it's terrible. And so you got the immediate gratification. But for weeks, months, years even, you're paying the price of the rush. When we flip this on its head and do the worst first, you do slow down. You don't get instant gratification. It's not immediately awesome, but you made all those decisions. You slowed down the process. So it is harder at the beginning, but then instead of paying the price later, you pay it up front. And for the rest of the seasons, the months, the years, you get to just enjoy all that hard work you did on the outset. Now, I made an entire video that shows you the second, step by step, to do the worst first, to get your garden in the right way. And you can watch that right here.
