Kitchen garden from scratch

A handy, productive home vegetable patch is more popular than ever. Planned and built right, it can even enhance the look of your home. Here's how one pro delivers on all counts—and you can, too

- SAL VAGLICA

In the pursuit of a bumper crop of vegetables, too often an edible garden's aesthetics fall by the wayside. For Nicole Burke, founder of Rooted Garden, a company that designs, installs, and maintains edible gardens in and around Houston, the backbone of the modern kitchen garden is a series of raised beds, fitted with trellises and gravel pathways, which add to both its beauty and utility. Inspired by the classic French potager, which weaves edibles with ornamentals in a design that complements the house, she wants her gardens to invite walking over for a better look. After all, the more inviting the garden, the likelier you are to spend time harvesting and maintaining it.

Burke is on a mission to make gardening easier and more appealing, so more people will get growing. To that end, she also teaches online courses (gardenary.com) and recently distilled what she's learned from nearly seven years of working with homeowners-and building more than 300 gardens-in a book, Kitchen Garden Revival. “I realized there is this stigma around growing food” she says of the step-by-step plan she lays out for creating an edible garden that's as attractive as it is bountiful. "While all the other aspects of the landscape were pretty, many homeowners didn't think food gardens were, so I set out to undo that and make it the most beautiful part of the landscape.”

The self-taught Burke's accessible style comes in part from having learned from some of the same rookie mistakes she's seen clients make-from filling beds with poor soil, which only leads to lots of time spent troubleshooting later, to not leveling garden beds beforehand, then watching a rainstorm wash just-planted seeds to the lowest corners.

Up ahead: key ingredients in Burke's recipe for gardening success and lessons learned from her years in the trenches.

STEP ONE

Find the sun