Nicole Johnsey Burke

Nicole Johnsey Burke was born in McComb, Mississippi and has lived in eight states including Texas, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee and now Illinois. A self taught gardener, Nicole is on a mission to bring back the kitchen garden and make it an ordinary part of everyone's life once again. Though the garden is Nicole's professional focus now, she actually spent the first decade of her career in the area of philanthropy, working overseas in rural China and then with Geneva Global in Philadelphia, PA. Nicole studied Accounting and Mathematics at Converse College in South Carolina and went on to study Mandarin and Linguistics after her time in China. Mom to four children, Nicole and her husband, Jason, began experimenting with backyard gardening a bit in Virginia and then full stop in Nashville, Tennessee and Houston, Texas. As her success in the garden grew, so did her passion for getting everyone else to start growing a little of their own food. In 2015, Nicole founded Rooted Garden, Inc, a company that designs, installs and maintains kitchen gardens in Houston, TX. Beginning out of her own urban raised beds, with just her garden experience, some bags of compost, and her mini van, Nicole's business grew quickly, serving more than 100 clients in less than two years and creating more than 150 beautiful raised bed gardens in the first four years. As a result of her success and a growing online audience, Nicole founded Gardenary, Inc. (gardenary.com) in 2017 to provide online garden education that brings her clients from beginner gardener all the way to becoming a professional garden coach. The Gardenary platform brings her audience through her proven path of first learning herb gardening, then salad gardens, mastering the complete kitchen garden, and finally pursuing garden coach training (her dream is to train 1000 gardeners to become coaches just as she has). Nicole's most active on Instagram @gardenaryco and has recently launched a podcast called, Grow Your Self, which tells the untold stories about the food we eat (you've got to listen in!). Nicole's hope and dream is that by the time her children are grown (just about ten years from now) the kitchen garden will be an ordinary part of everyone's lives once again. While many can feel overwhelmed or just give up at the thought of all the challenges our growing world faces, kitchen gardens are a positive step that everyone can make to create change for the better. Nicole's first book, Kitchen Garden Revival releases April 21, 2020 and teaches all the basics Nicole's used to create beautiful low maintenance kitchen gardens and makes it possible for anyone to create their own too. She's hoping it will be one of the first best selling gardening books-a true sign that a revival is actually on its way.