In this instructional video, Nicole Johnsey Burke explains how to protect an organic garden from pests using seven culinary herbs that also serve as kitchen ingredients. She frames herbs as a triple‑purpose tool: they emit strong scents that repel common garden pests, they attract beneficial insects such as bees, wasps, ladybugs, and hoverflies, and they provide fresh flavors for cooking. For each herb—sage, oregano, thyme, chives, rosemary, basil, and cilantro—Nicole describes the specific pests it deters, the crops it should be planted alongside (or avoided), seasonal planting considerations, and any special care (e.g., rosemary’s winter protection, cilantro’s succession planting). She also shares broader companion‑planting strategies, such as placing thyme under trellises, using creeping thyme in pathways, and avoiding alliums near beans and peas. Throughout, she emphasizes that these herbs are inexpensive, perennial (where applicable), and can replace synthetic chemicals, making pest control both effective and flavorful. The video concludes with a call to watch a related workshop for deeper garden setup guidance.
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The number one question I get about my gardens is this: Nicole, what do you do about all those pests? Everyone's expecting me to share a spray, a trap, a net, when actually the way I protect my garden from pests is with plants. And today you're going to learn how you can do this too. Over the next few minutes, I'm going to share these 7 plants that I put in every single one of my gardens and my clients' gardens to be sure that pests are never a problem. And the best part? All these plants, they taste really good in the kitchen too. When we're growing an organic garden, the last thing we want to do is add in synthetic chemicals to our plants. I found that the best way to protect our plants from pests is herbs. Herbs serve 3 purposes in the organic garden. Number 1, they are going to repel pests. They put off these really strong smells that most of the food-eating insects absolutely hate. Number 2, They attract beneficial wildlife. They're going to bring in bees, butterflies, hummingbirds, other beneficial insects that move the pollen around on your plants and actually give you more food. Finally, they taste so good for like a 1/100th of the price of the grocery store herbs. You're going to get so many new delicious flavors in your kitchen while you protect your garden from pests. So let's go into the garden. Let me show you these 7 plants. You're never going to see pest control the same again. Let's start with sage. Sage has this wonderful earthy woody smell. It's a perennial plant, so it will come back year after year. This is sage we planted last summer, and it just came back after the winter storms were over. Sage puts off this woody smell that so many pests do not like. Number 1, the cabbage moths and cabbage worms. They hate the smell of sage. Also flea beetles cannot stand it, and carrot flies too. You want to plant your sage near all kinds of brassicas, so cabbage, kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, plant sage next to that, and then next to your carrots and next to your tomatoes. It's a really smart idea to put sage in your garden at the beginning of the spring. You could also plant some in fall if you miss the summer season because sage is perfect for all your spring and fall crops. It's a great protectant, and these flowers, they attract so many bees. In fact, I can just look around right now and see like 3 or 4 bees just on this one plant. If you only plant one herb to protect your garden, let it be oregano. This is the mother of pest protection. Oregano puts off this extremely strong smell that is going to repel aphids, cabbage moths, cucumber beetles, and spider mites. You want to plant this near your summer crops, things like tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, any kind of gourd plants, and then you also want to plant this near your brassicas, so broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, also planted there. Hands down, this is the best protector of pests, both in the cool and in the warm season. As you walk through this garden with me, you might be thinking, "Man, I wish my garden looked like that," and guess what? It can. I'm teaching a workshop all about getting the setup, timing, and the planting right so that your garden looks as good as my mom's. You can watch that workshop right after this. I'll put a link right below this video. Thyme is a tiny but mighty plant. This is also in the mint plant family, and this puts off a smell that tomato pests absolutely hate. It also draws in predatory wasps, and those also will kill tomato hornworms. Obviously, you want to grow thyme right underneath your arch trellis. This is the Nicole arch trellis. I'll put a link to it right below this video if you don't have one yet, and you want to plant this right alongside all the tomatoes that you're growing on your arches. It's also a great plant to grow along peppers and eggplants. Of course, it's a great protection for brassica plants, the kale, the cabbage, the plants that need it the most. Then it also surprisingly grows really well next to strawberries, and if you're growing potatoes in a barrel or even in the ground, thyme is a great plant to have growing right alongside those potatoes. If you're setting up a little pathway and you want it to look more natural and more green, creeping thyme is also a great plant to put in between your stepping stones on the ground there. It'll put off this great fragrance every time you step on it, and just having it there in your pathways is going to help protect the whole garden from pests. Next up is chives. Chives are in the Amaryllidaceae family, the onion plant family, and they put off a very strong onion smell that so many pests hate. Chives are great to repel aphids, Japanese beetles—those ones are really tough—carrot flies, and spider mites. You can put chives pretty much near any kind of plant in the garden except for one. Chives work perfectly along brassicas, along carrots and tomatoes. You can even grow them along strawberries and roses. The one type of plant I would not put chives near are beans and peas. Studies have shown that when allium plant family is right alongside a bean plant family, there's a little bit of disruption in their growth. Other than that, you could cover the entire area of your garden with chives. They'll stand up like little soldiers protecting all your plants from pests. Rosemary is also in the mint plant family, and if you're in a cooler region, like not in zone 9 or 10, then rosemary is going to be the hardest plant of all these plants to keep alive through the winter. So you might need to dig up your rosemary, bring it inside, and baby it a little bit, and then bring it out at the end of spring after all the frost has passed. My mom had to start over with a new rosemary plant because hers died in the Nashville freeze this past winter. The rest of her herbs, they made it. So rosemary is just as powerful as the other herbs in repelling pests. It's going to have like a pine-like scent, and can I just say, this smell got me through grad school. There was a huge rosemary bush, I was in Dallas, Texas, and I would just pull off a little stem and carry it with me as I was going through my grad school days, which were pretty depressing until I met my husband. This little smell, it brings me back. So if you're depressed, if you're not feeling great, Get yourself some rosemary. Rosemary doesn't just make you feel good, it actually protects your garden from pests too. This is going to protect your garden from cabbage moths, from bean beetles, from carrot flies, and bonus, mosquitoes. Rosemary is a great plant to have alongside a line of beans, a line of peas. It's also great to have alongside your carrots. You can also have it near any of your nightshade plant family, so tomato, pepper, eggplant. It's a great pest protectant. There's an old saying that every garden gate should have rosemary, at either side of it. It's just like, that should be the first smell, the first plant you see when you walk into a garden. Maybe that's to keep out the mosquitoes, I don't know, but it's beautiful, it smells delicious, it literally has been proven to be an antidepressant, and it keeps away mosquitoes. So win-win-win. This is probably the most classic companion plant for tomatoes. Basil planted at the base of your tomatoes is going to repel hornworms, and it also puts off a smell that most of those sucking insects hate, so they'll stay off your tomatoes and you'll get tons of basil. Basil also repels a couple of other insects like aphids, whiteflies, thrips, and also mosquitoes. Basil is something that you want to plant near all the plants in the tomato plant family, the nightshade family: tomatoes, peppers, eggplants. Then you can also obviously put it near carrots. Basil is also a great plant to put near your potatoes. Basil is one of those interesting cousins in the family It's related and in the same family as thyme, oregano, sage, those plants that come back year after year, but the difference with basil is that it actually dies back every time there's frost, and it will not come back from the root. It will come back from seed, so these little flower pods, if they produce seed that drop to the ground, those seeds will give you basil the next season, or you might have to start all over and plant the seeds yourself. Either way, basil is a must in your garden. Cilantro is your secret weapon against pests, especially when you let it do this: bolt and flower every few weeks. Cilantro is going to put off a smell that will repel aphids, spider mites, and potato beetles, but it does something even better. These little white flowers, they're little umbrella flowers, and they attract some of the best beneficial insects. We're talking ladybugs, parasitic wasps, and hoverflies. When you let your cilantro go to seed like this, you're going to see all kinds of beneficial insects just swarming this plant, getting fed and then running to the rest of your garden to kill things like aphids that are attacking the rest of your spring plants. You want to put cilantro near any kind of green in your cool season garden, things like lettuces, kale, any of your brassicas. Then you also want to plant it near things like tomatoes and peppers. It's also, because it repels potato beetles, it's a great companion plant to your potatoes. So you could fill a barrel with potatoes and then put cilantro to grow up alongside those potatoes. I have a whole video on how to plant potatoes, so you could check that one out. I'll link it below. Cilantro is quick to bolt. They actually make a slow bolt variety because it's so common, so what you want to do is succession plant your cilantro every 2 weeks, put some more seed out. That way you can have cilantro to eat, cilantro to flower, and your whole garden is going to be protected by these little cilantro soldiers. Now today I've been showing off all the herbs in my mom's kitchen garden. It's crazy to believe that it was just a few months ago that we transformed this space from grass to garden, so if you want to see the entire behind the scenes of how we built the beds, put in the plants, all the plants you see here, then you can watch the entire transformation and meet my parents right here.
