Craig and I are enthusiastic but not greatly experienced vegetable gardeners. Although I must confess, I won second prize in a home vegetable garden that I made and looked after myself when I was 9 years old. So, I can’t say I am a new to this!
Try as we might, we had not a lot of success with our attempts at vegetable garden in Karori, possibly because of poor soil, windy position and lack of time due to busy careers and young children!
We have had much more success with our efforts of the last 4 years at our house in the Wairarapa even though we have had several challenges to contend with. There is a thriving population of rabbits in the area as well as many hungry birds. The soil is hard and clayey. We are exposed to extremes in weather, hot dry summers, cold frosty winters, and often strong winds. We have used various strategies with varying degrees of success to overcome these challenges.
Most of our vegetables are grown in raised beds – protecting the young tender shoots from the rabbits (and our backs from having to bend over too much). We use netting when necessary to protect our ripening tomatoes and strawberries and young radish and carrot sprouts from the birds. Our frost tender passionfruit is tucked up in frost cloth after a mid-winter prune and only uncovered when the weather gets warmer. We have installed an automated watering system so that our garden is watered even when we are not there. We make continuous improvements to the soil by digging in compost and the ready supply of piggy straw or sawdust from the local friendly pig farmer who also happens to be my father.
We mostly buy seedlings from the local garden shop. We would love to be able to raise all our plants from seeds, but this process requires us to be here more often to give them the nurturing they require. Something to look forward to in or retirement. In the meantime, we gratefully receive seedlings that Craig’s father has grown for us, cabbage and tomatoes for example. Dad’s wife Jenny is generous in her sharing of self-seeded seedlings of lettuces and leeks from her garden and dug up a head of rhubarb for us when we first established our veggie patch and we have eaten hearty from it.
There are some things that we can easily grow from seed; onions, carrots, radishes sown directly into the garden. Pumpkins are the easiest thing in the world to grow. Just save seeds from a particularly good pumpkin – I dry them on a saucer – then plant them in the spring. They need lots of space, but they generally look after themselves. We usually have far more pumpkin than we can eat ourselves and give them away to friends, family and the soup kitchen. We have had good success with garlic too. We bought planting garlic from the garden shop one year and saved some each year to plant again. We dry them out, plait the and hang them on nails in the woodshed.
Some things we have not been so successful with. We planted 2 blueberry bushes a few years ago. We have never had a blueberry off them and 1 has died. We love brussels sprouts but so do the bugs and we have manged to harvest only a handful of brussels sprouts but mostly the bugs get to them first.
We put all our vegetable scraps in a compost bin. We have been filling up the compost bin for the last 4 years. What we need now is another compost bin so that we can let the first one sit and ripen without new additions constantly. This is on our plan for when we get out of Level 4 lockdown. Before we had a compost bin I would dig a hole in the ground, in a lump of topsoil or in the veggie patch itself, and bury the scraps. This is a trick I learnt from rotarian and former Port Nicholson member, Margaret West when I visited her in Wanaka.
Another “gardening” technique that I love to do is forage. We are very fortunate to have an abundance of wild or semi wild food to forage from in our area. In the summer we pick blackberries when the farmer or council haven’t sprayed them. There are several plum, apple, quince and walnut trees around here either on the side of the road or the farm that were planted or self-seeded many years ago and continue to provide for us. This time of year is good for mushrooms. The conditions have to be just right and this year has been moderately good so far.
All in all I feel very lucky and my favourite thing to do is go down to the veggie patch with my willow trug and harvest fresh vegetables for dinner. It makes me feel like Annabel Langbein! We really are living the Good Life.