Kitchen Garden Revival

A modern guide to creating a stylish, small-scale, low-maintenance, edible garden

Nicole Johnsey Burke

• Publisher: Cool Springs Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780760366868
• eBook ISBN: 9780760366875
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Elevate your backyard veggie patch into a work of sophisticated and stylish art. Kitchen Garden Revival guides you through every aspect of kitchen gardening, from design to harvesting.

Author Nicole Johnsey Burke, founder of Rooted Garden, one of the leading US culinary landscape companies, and Gardenary, an online kitchen gardening education and resource company, leads the way with expert advice.

Participating in the grow-your-own movement is important to both reduce your food miles and control what makes it onto your family’s table. If you’ve hesitated to take part because installing and caring for a traditional vegetable garden doesn’t seem to suit your life or your sense of style, Kitchen Garden Revival is here to show you there’s a better, more beautiful way to grow food.

Instead of row after row of cabbage and pepper plants plunked into a patch of dirt in the middle of the yard, kitchen gardens are attractive, highly tailored food gardens consisting of easy-to-maintain raised planting beds laid out in an organized geometric pattern. Offering both four seasons of ornamental interest and plenty of fresh, homegrown fruits, vegetables, and herbs, kitchen gardens are the way to grow your own food in a fashionable, modern, and practical way.

Kitchen gardens were once popular features of the European and early American landscape, but they fell out of favor when our agrarian roots were displaced by industrialization. With this accessible and inspirational guide, Nicole aims to return the kitchen garden to its rightful place just outside of every backdoor.

Learn the art of kitchen gardening as you discover: 

• What characteristics all kitchen gardens have in common
• How to design and install gorgeous kitchen garden beds using metal, wood, or stone
• Why raised beds mean reduced maintenance
• What crops are best for your kitchen garden 
• A planting, tending, and harvesting plan developed by a pro
• Season-by-season growing guides 

It’s time to join the Kitchen Garden Revival and start growing your own delicious, organic food. 

PART ONE

CREATING THE KITCHEN GARDEN

CHAPTER ONE: SITE: Find the Perfect Kitchen Garden Spot

CHAPTER TWO: GATHER: Select Your Kitchen Garden Elements

CHAPTER THREE: FRAME: Install the Kitchen Garden Structures

CHAPTER FOUR: FILL: Add Soil and Water

CHAPTER ONE
SITE

Find the Perfect Kitchen Garden Spot

Picture a place that’s special to you—a spot you head to take a break, enjoy yourself, discover something new, spend time with people you love, or just reconnect with nature.

Now tell me: Did you picture a place far away or one nearby? Were you home or did you skip town? And, if you had to leave town (and most people do), do you think it’s possible to create a space that could be all those things but, instead, is right outside your back door?

Imagination, meet kitchen garden, a retreat and a getaway waiting for you in the backyard, on the porch, or just along the fence, your new escape from reality even when reality is just a few steps away.

In this chapter, you’ll face the challenging task of picking the site for your kitchen garden.

Choosing your kitchen garden’s location can be a tough decision. It’s one of the key tasks our garden coaches at Gardenary and my team at Rooted Garden do every day: we help clients make the choice between the left side of the backyard, the spot along the driveway, or the space next to the patio.

Choosing the location for your garden is tough for good reason—location means everything. In some cases, the decision may have already been made for you if you have only limited space, just a patio, or only one patch of ground that gets sunlight. And, for others, you may have countless spaces where a garden could belong. In both scenarios, there’s more to the decision than you think.

Let’s start with a message for the perfectionists and overachievers: there’s no such thing as a perfect location. At least, it’s very rare that you’ll find it, especially if you live in the city.

But even without a perfect spot, delicious food will grow beautifully in the space you have available. Something edible, possibly dozens of edible choices, will thrive in your space. There’s always room for you to grow your self.

Key Site Considerations

Picking the best spot for your kitchen garden isn’t just about opinion or the flip of a coin. It’s about balancing priorities and considerations. After designing hundreds of gardens, I’ve created a system that works to help you sort through the options.

There are four key aspects to consider before choosing your kitchen garden site:

1. Sunlight exposure

2. Water proximity

3. Convenience

4. Aesthetics

Materials include: jute twine, compass, soft mallet, garden scissors, soil tester, garden gloves, journal with graph lines, measuring tape (at least 24' [7.3 m] long), 6–12" (15 to 30 cm) wooden stakes.

(Nearly) PERFECT KITCHEN GARDEN LOCATION

6 or more direct sunlight hours per day, all year

Proximity to a water source

Near the kitchen and common household traffic

Ties in aesthetically to the existing landscape

Large enough space for your desired garden size and shape

My very scientific calculation has determined that exactly 60 percent of this decision should be based on sunlight; 20 percent on water accessibility; and the final 20 percent of the decision is split between convenience and aesthetics.

It’s true. I did say there’s no such thing as a perfect spot for the kitchen garden, but there is a perfect formula. As you select your garden location, the goal is to find a location that matches this blueprint as closely as possible: receives six or more hours of sunlight per day, is near a water source, and is located as close to the kitchen and your everyday activities as possible. You also want a spot that will tie in well to the rest of your landscape and is able to accommodate the size necessary to hold the amount of vegetables and fruit you’d like to harvest.

Each of these aspects should be considered, as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction. What’s a Kitchen Garden and Why It’s Time for a Revival
• Part One: Creating the Kitchen Garden
• Part Two: Growing the Kitchen Garden
• Appendix One: How to Take the Next Step in the Kitchen Garden Revival
• Appendix Two: Garden Listing
• Appendix Three: Celebrate Local
• Resources
• About the Author
• About the Photographer
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright