Kitchen Garden Tour crowns 2026 favorites
Local gardeners get props for their backyard crops at Dirt’s 12th annual Kitchen Garden Tour
| 27 Jul 2026 | 03:27
The Kitchen Garden Tour winners with Dirt mag editor Becca Tucker. Left to right: Larry Mansour, Alayna Bereziuk, Chad Pilieri of Common Ground Community Garden, Becca Tucker, Aysha Venjara, Nicole Hixon, Patrick and Skylar Moynihan. Photo: Molly Colgan
Nicole Hixon chats with visitors to her garden in Warwick, N.Y and offers them strawberry hibiscus iced tea. (
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Nicole Hixon of Warwick, N.Y., accepts her first place prize from Juno Gara, 10, who’s been going on the Tour her whole life. (
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From left: Garden winners Larry Mansour, Alayna Bereziuk, Chad Pilieri, Dirt Editor Becca Tucker, Aysha Venjara, Nicole Hixon, Patrick Moynihan and daughter Skylar Moynihan. (
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About 80 tourgoers spent Sunday, July 26 exploring a dozen gardens in New York and New Jersey, then met up for an afterparty at Meadow Blues in Chester, N.Y., to vote for their favorites.
The following gardeners won by popular vote this year:
• Nicole Hixon of Warwick, N.Y. took Best Kitchen Garden of 2026. Hixon, a sculptor whose work explores our relationship with nature, entered the Tour once before in 2020, winning third. This year, the Hixons’ ever-evolving kitchen garden is filled with several varieties of heirloom tomatoes, peppers, trellising cucumbers, gourds, melons, a green bean teepee, snap peas, zucchini, eggplant, a potato tower, strawberries, brassicas, lettuces, herbs, and a wide variety of flowers and companion plants that attract pollinators and support a healthy garden ecosystem. She served up strawberry hibiscus iced tea and pesto tortellini to visitors.
“I’ve worked so hard on our garden, it’s been a place of joy and solace and I’m so glad I got to share it with the community today,” she said after the Tour.
Alayna Bereziuk of Wantage, N.J. took second place for Best Garden. A perennial pollinator bed welcomes visitors to Bereziuk’s “fairytale garden,” as one tourgoer described it, where veggies, flowers, and medicinal and culinary herbs coexist in raised beds surrounded by a cedar fence. The beds overflow onto vertical elements like cattle panels, obelisks, an enchanting windmill and a hand-built arbor.
• Aysha Venjara of Chester, N.Y. and Larry Mansour of Warwick, N.Y. tied for third place. In addition to being a wealth of garden knowledge who have taken home first in past years on the Tour, both also happen to be successful beekeepers. Venjara partners with Cornell’s gleaning program to harvest veggies from her garden for the food pantry, keeps chickens and geese and grows shiitake mushrooms on logs to sell to local restaurants. Mansour has harvested over 100 pounds of honey already this year from his hives. He and his wife, Diane, gave visitors little honey bears of their hives’ honey on the way out. His orchard and berry patch feature apples, pears, apricots, cherries, gooseberries, black currants, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries.
• Common Ground Community Garden in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., took first place for Best Community Garden. The free, open, shared garden features a hoop house, rainwater catchment system, keyhole garden bed, and three-bin composting system. It’s Common Ground’s fifth time taking home an award from the Tour.
• Patrick Moynihan of Vernon, N.J. took Most Hospitable Garden for the third time. In addition to veggies, Moynihan’s “piece of paradise” features two peach trees, a pear tree, and a dozen grapevines. His lovingly tended yard boasts a koi pond and 38 birdhouses whose residents he feeds daily.
“Whenever I drive past a kitchen garden, I slow down and rubberneck – don’t you?” said Becca Tucker, editor and publisher of Dirt magazine. “I know the person who lives inside that house is a kindred spirit.”
“The point is, I’m drawn to gardeners. And to have you all here, together, on one day of the year is a treat I don’t know what I did to deserve,” said Tucker. “So thank you, gardeners, for cultivating the land, for opening your garden gates today, and for bringing forth greens that won’t give us explosive diarrhea.”