What a gardening pro learned about growing food in Houston
Warm weather means more chances to harvest
Nicole Johnsey Burke had lived and gardened in many places where her plants would just shut down in the winter. When she moved to Houston in 2013, she started growing that fall and was stunned at how abundant her harvests of greens were. She pulled from her boxes every day and didn’t buy salad from the grocery store for six months.
When she told friends and neighbors of her lettuce successes, they looked at her like she was crazy. Nothing grows here in Houston, they said, it’s too hot, it’s too humid, and the soil is terrible.
Johnsey Burke saw a need in the community for locally grown food and wanted to try her hand at business. At first, she thought about selling her greens, but a friend of hers told her what she actually needed was to be taught how to garden for herself.
In 2015, she created Rooted Garden, a kitchen garden consulting business. She was initially put in touch with friends of friends who entrusted her with their backyards, and the operation grew organically from there, through word of mouth and client referral.
“Houston has a unique spirit where people are entrepreneurial and they’re excited about new things,” said Johnsey Burke. “The city really welcomed me with open arms.”
After a few years establishing edible gardens in homes across the Houston area, she learned quite a few tricks for tailoring vegetable patches to each landscape. She codified this wisdom in her new book, “Kitchen Garden Revival” (Cool Springs Press), which teaches budding kitchen gardeners everything they need to know, from design to harvest.
Her friends’ initial skepticism about growing in Houston was definitely rooted in certain truths. Yes, the soil is bad here. Known to gardeners as “gumbo clay,” it’s incredibly thick and wet, and doesn’t have the air movement necessary for food plants. Many have very fragile root systems, which will rot and suffocate if grown directly in the ground. This is why Johnsey Burke works exclusively with raised beds, in which she uses a sandy loam soil blend cut with plenty of compost.
As for the weather being too hot, it’s not so much a misconception as it is a misunderstanding.
“We have four seasons of gardening in Houston,” said Johnsey Burke. “They’re just not the four seasons that the rest of the world has.”
Instead of a conventional spring, summer and fall, she sees Houston as having two warm seasons (March to May and September to November) separated by a hot season ( June to August). Take tomatoes, for example. She puts them in the ground as early as February and harvests them in the spring, way before other parts of the country have even planted them. Then she’ll get another round of tomatoes in the fall. Other vegetables that do well in both warm seasons are peppers, beans, zucchini
and squash.
During the hot season, gardeners must get creative. Johnsey Burke tells her clients to think about what grows in other hot climates of the world: sweet potatoes, basil, okra, eggplants, tomatillos. For those who don’t want to go out and garden at all when temperatures peak, she suggests covering beds with sweet potatoes, a low-maintenance vegetable that people can plant in early June and let grow until September, when it’s cooler to go out and harvest.
To help with the humidity, she recommends using trellises, which not only allow for growing more abundantly in a small space, as plants grow up and not out, but also avoid leaves touching the soil.
True to her book title, Johnsey Burke wants kitchen gardens to have a revival. Back in the day,
she explains, it was very common for people to have a vegetable patch in their garden. When grocery stores rose to prominence, that part of life slowly got lost.
“Progress is great, but sometimes there are some things we should go back and pick up again,” she said.
It’s especially important now, she adds, as the coronavirus pandemic has people confined to their homes. Gardening is good for mental health and encourages people to be outside and around nature. It’s also good for nature itself; even when she’s setting up just one raised bed, she sees it attract bees, butterflies and lizards.
Johnsey Burke also hopes growing their own food will give people a taste for fresh produce, making them support local farmers markets and nurseries, helping the community as well as themselves.