This Gardening Method Changed My Life

What if I told you you could grow more food in less space with half the effort? As a busy mom of four kids and a business owner, if I did not have this planting method, gardening would definitely not work for me. So it is safe to say this garden planting method completely changed my life. So in the next few minutes, I'm going to detail all the things about this planting method. First, how I learned it, and surprisingly, it was not from a gardening book. It's from a very different kind of place. Second, I'm going to show you how you can implement this planting method without using a chart or looking up every single plant you want to put into your garden. And finally, I'm going to show you how all the things that are stressing you out about gardening get answered simply by planting this way. So if this sounds like something that's up your alley, let's get into it. All right? So when I first started gardening, I was following all the rules. Maybe you did this too. I went to the big box store, we bought plants, looked at the plant tags, did exactly what the plant tag said. We followed the directions on the back of the seed packages, and it wasn't working. Like, our first few gardens were not great. We tried again when we moved to Houston and we used raised beds, better soil, and we did have some improvements in the garden, but it still wasn't quite working. And then we took a trip. I didn't buy a gardening book, I didn't watch a bunch of great videos on the YouTube. Instead, we took this trip to Big Bend National Park. My husband was turning 40 and it was like a bucket list for him. My kids were tiny at the time. Looking back, I don't know what we were thinking, cuz we brought them on these huge hikes and they were like little preschoolers, but I mean, not all of them, but the smallest ones were. And we hiked. We hiked a lot. And it was July. July in Texas, basically right on the border of Texas and Mexico. So yeah, it was not that pleasant. And there was like no one there. It was my husband's goal. So we were there and. And we decided to make the most of it. So we took a hike every single day. And it was the third day that I had my light bulb moment, my light bulb moment for the garden in the desert. So we were on this hike in the desert, supposed to have an all terrain vehicle to get here. I mean, this thing is way out. So we just prayed that the minivan would make it. And it did. And so we're on this long walk down to Balance Rock, I think is what it's called. It's a super neat rock that's balancing like on like this much. And there's a desert. It's a desert walk to get out there. And we're talking sand, we're talking cacti. It's just like a nothing. It's like what you would think of as just like a barren land. And it's middle of July. No weeding, no watering, no fertilizer. Like, nobody's out here caring for this area, right? So my husband's trying to eat some prickly pear cactus. My kids are freaking out at all the creatures and the, the bugs that are out here in the desert. And I'm looking at the plants because we have had all this trouble in the garden. We've been trying to make it work. And we're out here in this desert and. And y', all, there are plants like everywhere. Like, plants that are not just like surviving, they're thriving. And the more we walk down this path heading to the rock, the more I start to notice that there'd be patches where there's no plants. And then if a plant was there, it was never alone. It wasn't one plant. It wasn't just five plants. It was like 15 or 20 or 25 plants all together. And I started to realize it wasn't just one type of plant in these groups of plants. It was a bunch of different types of. Typically, there'd be one large plant or two or three in the middle, and those might be like a century plant or a big cacti, something that's large and towering. And then underneath that plant would be bushes, so things that are smaller, like 2ft tall, 3ft tall, something like that. And then underneath those medium sized plants were all these sprawling, crawling plants, kind of like ground covers that were just kind of creeping out further away from the main area. And it happened again and again. It was clearly a pattern. So plants loved growing together. 10, 15, 25 plants in a clump, different sizes, large, medium and small. And they were all working together to stay alive in even the harshest conditions. And that was my light bulb moment. So I brought that home. And when I started to plant my garden that next season, I was like, I am not following the rules anymore. I'm going to do what I saw in that national park. And so I started to group plants together, large, medium and small in every single bed. I never left space around the plants. I made sure that I used every single square inch of the garden. And I planted it as thickly, as intensively as possible. Now, you've probably heard of this kind of term called intensive planting. I talk about it in my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. And so what is intensive planting? It's this idea of putting the plants as close as possible, so you give the plant as much space as it needs to grow to its full maturity, but not a square inch more. And so I brought my own method to it. You know, a lot of people talk about intensive planting, but generally they're planting all the same types of plants in one space, or they are. They're doing, like, blocks of plants. And what I brought into it was the exact same image I had from that national park, which was large plants down the middle, medium sized plants surrounding it, and then small plants that sprawl and crawl over the edges of the bed. So I brought that same model to the garden that I saw in the national park, and my garden exploded. It was full of growth, it was full of harvest. It was so beautiful and overflowing. And I was like this. This is the way I'm going to garden for the rest of my life. By the way, if you want me to teach you all the details about planting your garden this way, you can find out exactly how to do that with the gardenary planting method. I'll put a link in the description so you can find out how to get that right away if you want to start implementing this in your garden for next season. Now, I don't know about you, but when I go to garden or have some time in the garden, I don't really have time to go print out some chart that tells exactly where every single plant has to go in the garden. Those kind of things just stress me out. And so one of the great things about this method that I kind of figured out almost accidentally, is that you don't need a chart to know how to plant this way. All you have to do is classify plants and start to put plants in groups. And I first started to do this with my clients when I was working with clients in Houston, and I started to help them understand that all plants came in families. And the biologists, some scientists, did this for us to help us better understand plants characteristics. And so I started to learn the plant families, and that helped me along my way. And I talk about this in my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. But then I realized that we could actually make it even simpler than using plant family names, and that's simply by categorizing plants as small, medium, and large. So essentially, you know, if plants are little, they're going to go on the outside of the beds. If they're medium sized, they're going to go in the middle. And. And if they're large, they're going to be in the very, very middle of the bed or over a trellis like this. Exactly mimicking what I saw in Big Bend National Park. And then I realized that there were not just sizes, but these actually were characteristics of plants. Basically, what we actually eat from the plant completely correlates with their size. So check this out. If you harvest a plant for its leaves, so if it's a herb or a lettuce green, then guess what, it's small. Those plants are small plants. They don't need a lot of space. They're sprawling, they're crawling, they'll grow right over the edge of a bed. So herbs and flowers and lettuce, greens, those are your small plants. And then if you're growing a plant to eat its root, so something like beets or carrots or radishes, potatoes, those things can be classified as medium sized plants. They take up a little bit more space and need a little bit more sun and time to grow in the garden. And then if you're growing a plant to eat its fruit, something like a tomatillo, a bean, a cucumber, a tomato, then that's going to be a large plant. Those need a lot more space. They're going to be nice and big and tall, and they're going to take up more room in the garden. So we have small, medium, large, or leaves, roots and fruit. I mean, how easy is that? So when you plan out your garden, you're going to think fruit in the middle, then the root crops and then the leaves on the outside, and no more chart necessary. I mean, that's a gardening system even I can remember. Speaking of leaves, roots and fruit, I wrote a whole book literally called Leaves, Roots and Fruit. So if you want to get that, we'll put the link in the description below too. Let's talk about this method and the issues, because every single time I show people my gardens and how intensively we plant them, when people see that, they go, what about the disease? Doesn't this make all these plants, you know, harbor disease when their leaves are touching things like that? What about the pests? Don't pests just completely obliterate those plants since they're so closely planted together? And what about production? Doesn't this slow the plant's production when they're all growing so closely? But the crazy Thing is, this planting method doesn't cause those problems, it actually solves them. So first, let's talk about the pest issue. When you plant this way, you are going to have lots of herbs and flowers all around the border of the garden. You're going to have so much variety inside your beds. And so all that variety, all those different smells and textures, it actually interrupts pests as they're attacking your plants. So they might eat from one plant, but as soon as they travel to the next, it's going to be a different kind of plant and generally isn't their host. So this wide variety of plants actually helps prevent pests rather than causing them. The same is true for disease. Now, I do have a whole intensive planting pledge you have to take, and that includes pruning quite a bit. So you do have to do some work, but all the work is essentially pruning and harvesting, which I don't know about you, but if I have to pick a garden task to do, those are the two I want to be doing. So you do have to do a little bit of pruning to prevent the disease. But again, we get the prevention of all these different plants growing together. And the way the chemistry of these plants works together, it actually helps to keep the plants healthier. Think about any time you've been in nature. Think about anytime you've been on a walk. Do you see just one kind of plant growing in the wild? No. Do you see just one plant growing all by itself with nothing but bare soil around it? Obviously not. What you see in nature are plants all grouped together, growing in this wild way. And I can bet you probably see very little disease when you see those plants. These plants love to grow like this, and it's actually a protection against pest and disease, not a cause of it. Finally, production. I hear so many people say, well, when all those plants are growing so closely together, you probably don't get the most that you can from each and every plant. And this, again, is where those two responsibilities come into play. You do have to prune and you do have to harvest. Let me tell you the things that actually do slow the production of your plants. That is running out of water, that is being choked out by weeds or running out of great nutrients in the soil. And. And this planting method prevents those things from happening. So when you have covered the entire soil bed with plant matter, then the water stays in the soil, it doesn't evaporate. The worst thing you can have for a plant is open soil space in those spaces. That's where the water is going to leave the soil quickest and dry out those plants. That's what's going to slow productivity of your plant. Or if you have lots of open soil, it's also going to lose its nutrients fast. One of the worst things you can do for your soil is have it open to the sun. The sun is going to scorch that soil and dry it out, take out the nutrients that otherwise could be used by your plants. So when you cover your soil with lots of plant mass, you actually increase the productivity of each of those plants because they're going to keep the water inside the soil. There's not going to be weeds taking up space that otherwise could be productive plants. And the nutrients that are so necessary to grow each of those plants stays in the soil rather than evaporating and being burned out by too much heat and too much sunlight. So all the things you're worried about happening in the garden, like pests and disease and lack of production, they actually get answered with this planting method. So I have to be honest, when I first started using this planting method and had success in my own garden, I was skeptical. I was like, maybe this only works for me. And then I started my business in 2015. I started putting in gardens all over my city and town. And I at first held back. I didn't plant exactly the way I'd been doing in my own garden. And then I decided to go all in and take the exact same planting method I was using and put it into all these brand new beginner gardeners. And let me tell you, the results were crazy good. People were calling me. Clients were like, I don't know what to do with all this produce. Like, my biggest problem is figuring out what to do with everything I'm picking. And it happened again and again and again. People that had never gardened before literally promised me that they had no green thumb, were suddenly sending me pictures of the meals they were making from their garden every single week. So this planting method didn't just change my life, it's literally changed thousands of our clients and students since I started teaching it way back in, like, 2017. So if you are stressed about pests or disease or you think your garden is never going to produce, if you're just tired of working really hard in the garden for this much production, then you have got to try my garden planting method. I love teaching this, and I teach all the details about it inside of Gardenary365. This is our most affordable service where I teach you how to garden just the way I do. We have coaches that help you for your specific region, and then we even tell you what to do every single day of the year so that you can eat from your garden every single day of the year. That's why it's called Gardenary 3 365. Because there's 365 days a year, except on leave here. Then it's 366. That was confusing. Anyway, if you want to start making the garden way more fun, way less stressful. If you're a busy person like me and you just want to have great, delicious, fresh food but you don't have a ton of time to do it, you've got to try out Gardenary365. We'll put the link in the description right below this video. I want to know what you think about my planting method and if you've ever been to a national park. If you have, tell me what the plants look like there and if you're committed to making your garden look more wild like the national park. Because I am all about it. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. Hit that like button. Tell everybody you know that they should come and watch this video so they're not stressed about gardening either. Thanks for watching. Bye for now.