Author Nicole Burke Celebrates One-Year Anniversary of Kitchen Garden Revival And Works To Bring Back Kitchen Gardens In The Movement for Sustainability
CHICAGO, IL (March 30, 2021) – Having sold over 20,000 copies since its launch in May 2020, Kitchen Garden Revival (a Modern Guide to Creating a Stylish, Small-scale, Low Maintenance Edible Garden) has impacted thousands to elevate their kitchen gardens in a sustainable and easy-to-maintain way. Now celebrating the one-year anniversary of the book’s launch, best-selling author Nicole Burke is eager to continue the revival of kitchen gardens in a mission to bring back the once-popular features of the European and early American landscape.
Participating in the grow-your-own movement has become a popular idea in the year 2020 as the world’s population found themselves isolated at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The movement has contributed to furthering the importance of sustainability as maintaining home gardens reduces a consumer’s food miles and allows them to control what makes it onto their family’s table. For novice and experienced gardeners alike, Kitchen Garden Revival goes beyond the basic gardening guide to ask readers to re-examine how home landscapes are used to enhance more than just culinary creations, but also to benefit households, local communities, and even the world. “From improving the mental health of the urban farmer to the wellbeing of our global environment, the rationale for kitchen gardening resonates loud and clear,” says a review from The Oregonian. After sharing the philosophical and practical reasons for starting a kitchen garden, Burke goes into a detailed discussion guiding the reader through every aspect of kitchen gardening, from design to harvesting.
“Kitchen gardens, though we may have forgotten the term, aren’t a new concept. They’ve been a thing for thousands of years. But somewhere along our way of progress, we lost the kitchen garden. With the input of technology and industry, our food systems have changed dramatically over the last century. And while not all the change has been bad, the kitchen garden is something that should’ve stayed.”
– Nicole Burke in an excerpt from Kitchen Garden Revival
Kitchen Garden Revival shows readers that there’s a better, more beautiful way to grow food no matter your life or sense of style. 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 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. “Whether you are starting a vegetable garden for the first time or are troubleshooting the garden you already have, Kitchen Garden Revival is required reading,” says Lauri Kranz, author of A Garden Can Be Anywhere. Other reviews of Burke’s debut title describe Kitchen Garden Revival as “masterful, practical and inspirational” (Lara Casey, Author of Cultivate: A Grace-Filled Guide to Growing An Intentional Life), and “a fun read that makes gardening approachable, accessible and enjoyable- without overcomplicating it” (Timothy Pakron, author of Mississippi Vegan).
“Nicole makes gardening approachable and fun no matter what color your thumbs are.”
– Myquillyn Smith, Wall Street Journal Best Selling Author of Cozy Minimalist Home
About the Author:
Nicole Johnsey Burke, founder of Rooted Garden, one of the leading US culinary landscape companies, and Gardenary Inc., an online kitchen gardening education and resource company, is on a crusade to bring back the kitchen garden, make gardening a profitable profession again, and basically save the planet one garden at a time. Born into a family of Southern gardeners, Nicole swore she’d only have a yard full of gravel when she grew up. But after two years of development work in rural China, Nicole saw things differently – she’d grown an appreciation for nature and a deeper connection to local and seasonal food. After learning through trial and error in her own family’s backyard garden, Nicole developed a system she could share with others leading to the creation of Rooted Garden in 2015, a business that designs, installs, and maintains kitchen gardens in Houston, TX. After the quick success of Rooted Garden, Nicole launched Gardenary Inc. in 2017 as a new tech company that’s taught 1000s of students how to garden and trained hundreds of gardeners to start their own garden coach businesses. In late 2019, Nicole launched the Gardenary platform: the ‘Uber’ of gardening and quickly followed by her breakthrough book, Kitchen Garden Revival, in the spring of 2020. Overall, Nicole hopes to make the garden an ordinary part of everyday life again, and she plans to train more than 10,000 gardeners as Garden Consultants and teachers to make that possible. “To create whole and happy lives, for the beauty in our homes, for the benefit of our community, and for the good of the world, it’s time for a kitchen garden revival,” says Nicole. “A revival is a magical thing. Perhaps this book will be that seed….but I’ll need you to bring the rain and the sunshine.”
