How the "Martha Stewart of Gardening" Made Millions on IG

In 2011, Nicole Burke got a $450 refund check from her daughter's preschool and spent it on a garden.

That garden became Gardenary, a gardening education company that has been featured in USA Today, Southern Living, and Better Homes & Gardens.

From what we can tell, Nicole’s taught 10,000+ gardening students and built a multi 7-figure business off low-ticket courses while building her audience to 1.7+ million.

All while talking about…plants.

Not to mention, her content makes it ridiculously easy to link to her preferred gardening supplies, so she’s gotta be doing another 7-figures in annual affiliate revenue as well…

Nicole is today's internet version of Martha Stewart. 

Except Martha Stewart didn't build a content engine that posts 50x per month on social media.

Nicole did.

As always, I ran Nicole’s last 100 posts through Sandcastles to figure out exactly how she's winning, and what I found out is extremely interesting.

Everything we're about to break down works in any niche. Here's what the data says…

How Nicole Built A Content Firehose Without Running Out Of Ideas

Nicole is posting content at maximum velocity (max velo we call it). She’s posting so frequently, this analysis only spans May and June of this year.

To make the analysis pristine, we filtered out all brand deal content she’s posted during that time. Brand deals are artificially juiced with paid spend and so the viewers are higher than they should be. If you’re running analyses in Sandcastles, make sure to filter these out so it doesn’t skew your results.

If you study her content strategy, she’s another example of a creator using my 6x5 method to pick topics and formats.

6 topics x 5 formats that unlock maximum velocity in content creation. It looks like this:

All 6 of Nicole’s topics are obviously aligned with gardening:

• Pest Control & Companion Planting — how to grow without chemicals

• Growing & Harvesting — what to plant, when to harvest, how to get more out of every bed

• Garden Design & Lawn — alternatives to grass, raised beds, backyard layout

• DIY & Home — garden-to-home crossover content like the rosemary hair oil

• Gardening Tips & Education — mindset, rules, and philosophy of the organic garden

• Gardening Humor – the relatable chaos of being someone who gardens

The fact that anytime she goes outside to film, she’s got 6 topics at her fingertips to rotate through makes posting 50x / month possible.

Nicole‘s 5 Content Formats (That Work In Any Niche)

If you haven’t picked up on it yet, Nicole makes gardening content. Her audience is suburban adults who want a beautiful backyard without a horticulture degree. Her niche couldn't be more specific.

But the formats she's running are not gardening specific, they're universal content structures that work because of how human psychology responds to video. 

Format 1 — Skit/Humor

This is her best format and it's not even close. The format has produced every single one of her breakout moments over the last 2 months, and she knows it. She’s using it roughly once every 6 posts.

Her best skits follow this structure: set up a familiar premise, then subvert it completely in the final second:

• "After 20 bags of topsoil, $500 of materials, and hours of research, planning, tending, and planting, I present to you..." — 979K views, 10.7× outlier

• "Life Hack: Give yourself 8-12 hours of alone time every morning in your garden to start the day right" — 562K views, 6.4× outlier

• "Come here. Look at me. Look at me. Hey. Hey." — 512K views, 6.2× outlier

For someone who over-indexes on education, this is a reprise that lets her audience in on the joke and that parasocial warmth is working to convert viewers > followers.

Now of course, this doesn’t mean you have to make skits/humor work if that’s not natural to your personality.

But if you like coming up with funny quips, and it is easy for you to turn them into videos, these tend to have a broader TAM than other specifically tactical videos.

Skits are something I could never pull off, but it works super well for Nicole.

Format 2 — Problem/Solution

This is her workhorse and the format she reaches for when she has something to teach and a clear problem to solve.

Her best problem/solution posts feel like someone grabbed you by your overalls before you made a critical (gardening) mistake.

• "I'm going to Home Depot and I'm going to show you some things you should not buy right now." — 190K views, 2.1× outlier

• "I wish more people knew breaking the plant spacing rules makes gardens grow so much better." — 401K views, 4.9× outlier

• "My Daughter Wanted $89 Rosemary Oil For Her Hair" — 274K views, 2.7× outlier

This is a classic format anyone can replicate (especially in an education niche) if you know what your ideal client is doing wrong and what they should do instead. 

Format 3 — Listicle

While this is her most-used format over the last 2 months, it’s also her worst-converting one. This is why it’s so important to analyze your content as you run the 6x5 method so you don’t end up repeating a losing format.

When she doesn't have a strong angle, she lists things. This has only produced 2 above-average results in 2 months:

• "July is the month that most gardeners quit." — 224K views, 2.5× outlier

• "If you want a garden that survives on neglect, plant these:" — 122K views, 1.1× outlier

The listicle isn't inherently a bad format…actually, it’s carrying a lot of channels on its back like @samwallreadsbooks. The format can work. It just needs a hook that earns the list before the list starts.

You can’t open with "Here are five..." or "These are the top..." fill-in-the-blank because there’s no tension or reason for people to stay beyond mild curiosity. The strongest listicles work because the hook creates urgency before the list even starts.

Format 4 — Tutorial

This is her most straightforward educational format and it crushes because gardening is visual by default. What I mean by that is Nicole doesn’t have to work as hard to edit a tutorial video as other educational creators because her niche is inherently super visual...

• "Get Rid of Aphids with This Natural Spray" — 329K views, 3.6× outlier

• "This is how you can grow a lifetime supply of cilantro from one three dollar seed packet." — 108K views, 1.2× outlier

Format 5 — Mistake

Her posts in this format work because they lead with a slightly alarming directive that implies the viewer is already doing something wrong.

She has three posts in this format across 100 total. Given that it's outperforming her listicle format (which she's using ten times as often) the data is making a pretty clear argument for where her next batch of posts should come from.

• "Stop growing tomatoes alone." — 92K views, 1.1× outlier

• "DON'T KILL YOUR DILL!" — 120K views, 1.2× outlier

• "I'm going to Home Depot and I'm going to show you some things you should not buy right now." — 190K views, 2.1× outlier

The format feeds on loss aversion. The viewer who grows tomatoes can't scroll past "stop growing tomatoes alone" without knowing why they need to stop. The gardener who has dill can't ignore "DON'T KILL YOUR DILL."

If you want to get a comprehensive list of other top formats, the Collections feature in Sandcastles has a bunch of top examples across the top 22 short-form formats. This shows you outlier videos from lots of different niches, sorted by specific formats, visual hook types, and more. To access, just join the Starter plan and click the Collections tab to access

The 6 Hook Formulas Nicole Uses (And The Mad-Lib For Each One)

Last thing I did was I pulled the spoken hook from every one of her last 100 posts, graded them against the 8 universal hook principles, and grouped them into 6 recurring structures. 

Then, I used the hook skill in the MCP to convert every single hook into a mad-lib formula you can drop your own topic into today.

Hook 1 — "POV: You're my plants..." / "What I think my plants sound like..."

Nicole gives inanimate objects a point of view and invites the viewer to inhabit it. She’s talking about plants, so this is really unexpected…nobody else in the gardening space is writing hooks from the perspective of Larry The Tomato so the format is inherently shareable.

• "POV: You're my plants every time I walk into the garden" — 144K views, 1.6× outlier

• "What I think my plants sound like when they get watered" — 251K views, 2.5× outlier

This would be great if you create content in a niche with inanimate objects, or if you just tried to personify your laptop / iPhone / things you use every day watching you work. Great use of this in the “boarding pass” trend right now. This also pairs particularly well with b-roll content for a low-lift Reel when you need it.

Hook 2 — "No one warned me about this..." / "They don't tell you..."

I like this hook because Nicole frames her gardening information like something the garden section manager at Home Depot is deliberately withholding from you. It’s like there’s an implied conspiracy between Nicole and the old man standing by the rosemary plants and she wants you to be in on the secret. 

• "No one warned me about this danger when I started gardening so I'm going to show it to you..." — 421K views, 4.7× outlier

• "They don't tell you about this growing up, but eventually you're gonna spend like 200 bucks on sand" — 217K views, 2.0× outlier

It’s also easy to turn this into comedy if you want to be sarcastic or poke fun at yourself.

Hook 3 — "DON'T [VERB] YOUR [THING]!" / "Stop [doing thing]."

Similar to the mistakes format, this works on loss aversion because IF you’re doing what she’s telling you NOT to do…you can’t keep scrolling.

• "DON'T KILL YOUR DILL!" — 120K views, 1.2× outlier

• "Stop growing tomatoes alone." — 92K views, 1.1× outlier

• "Can everyone stop using Roundup and use this instead?" — 62K views, 0.7× outlier

This is a lot like my triple hook method if you want to apply it to your own account.

Hook 4 — "If you...."

Nicole describes a symptom the viewer recognizes in their own garden, then offers a prescription for what to do about it.

• "If your cucumber plant looks like this one, so beautiful and healthy but zero cucumbers, I've got 3 questions for you." — 106K views, 1.1× outlier

• "If you want a garden that survives on neglect, plant these:" — 122K views, 1.1× outlier

• "If you want the best garden in your neighborhood, don't do these 3 things..." — 88K views, 1.0× outlier

This pairs particularly well with the problem/solution format, if you’re an educational creator you need to be using this.

This Is How You Build A Content System That Gets Smarter Every Month

Nicole's content system is a 6x5 run at maximum velocity, analyzed, and reloaded every month. Here's how to build yours.

Step 1 — Build your first 6x5.

Pick 6 topics in your niche where you have a genuine perspective and 5 formats you want to test. Make the grid. Post for a month.

If you're not sure which topics to pick, build a watchlist in Sandcastles of 10 to 20 creators already winning with your audience. Sort by outlier score, filter to 2%+ engagement, and let the data tell you which topics are already working in your niche.

Step 2 — Run it through Sandcastles.

After a month of posting, pull your own account into Sandcastles, deep analyze all the videos and feed it into Claude via the MCP. Ask it to cluster your posts by topic and format, then give you the average outlier score for each bucket. Video tutorial for doing this here

This is where the 6x5 gets interesting. Nicole's Humor bucket has a 2.77× average outlier. Her Garden Design bucket has a 0.64×. That gap tells her what to cut and what to double down on based on data.

Step 3 — Reload.

Take what the data tells you and rebuild the rotation for next month. Swap out the underperforming topic for something new you want to try. Shift more of your format slots toward what's converting. Run it again.

The 6x5 is a monthly cycle of build, post, analyze, reload. Every month your rotation gets smarter than the last.

That's how Nicole posts 50x/month without burning out and without going stale. The system does the thinking. She just shows up and creates.

Start here. Keep crushing!

Btw, we’ve been running the Creator Breakdown series for a while now. Seems like you guys are loving it and that’s great!

So we decided to open up submissions for the next creator/channel we should cover.

If there's a creator you want us to run through the Creator Breakdown series next, drop a name and we'll pick a few to break down in upcoming editions.

PS: If you're ready to start growing faster on social media, you can sign up for Sandcastles here: sandcastles.ai