Starting Out in Your Vege Garden: Choosing Your Site.

Choosing your site: Aspect, Shelter, Drainage and Close to the kitchen.

Aspect for us here in NZ means north facing – find the sunniest spot you can. Plants won’t thrive without the sun.

Full sun, shelter from strong cold winds and free-draining deep soil is the ideal for your garden.  You will want to avoid cold frost pockets and too much shade. Find a north facing spot and put up some shelter in the south end (for the southern hemisphere) to start with.  If you can “borrow” a neighbour’s fence that is a good start and even better if that is corrugated iron, brick or stone as those materials will absorb heat and radiate it back onto your plants.  My dream garden would be one of the old walled gardens in Britain – the stone walls provide shelter and thermal mass, releasing heat back into the garden at night and moderating the temperatures. They also provide shelter from the wind and somewhere for climbing plants to grow or for espaliered fruit trees.  So if you’re lucky enough to live in an area where there is lots of natural stone then go for it!

You do need to watch for patches of wind turbulence with solid walls though.  Shelter trees can be a better option as they break up the wind rather than stop it and move the turbulence elsewhere.  If you are going to plant a shelter hedge then why not choose a fruiting hedge. Try feijoa, blueberry, currant, rosemary, cranberry, guava.  These plants are obviously going to be permanent so you will still need to keep a couple of metres between them and your main vege patch to ensure the plants don’t rob your vegetables of nutrients.  You will see in my plan that I have put in a Feijoa hedge on the western end of my garden – it is evergreen and hardy and provides delicious fruit in early winter.

The prevailing wind for much of NZ is a westerly so shelter on that side is important – bearing in mind that you still want as much sunlight as possible. The permaculture model would be to have a semi circle of mixed shelter with the highest shelter at the back (southern end) graduating down to lower at the eastern and western ends.  Maybe a blueberry hedge on the western side and a fruiting currant down the east?  Or evergreen cranberry makes a great well behaved low growing evergreen hedge.  These hedges will take some time to grow so if you are able then get some shelter cloth in to provide the first few years of shelter.  Doesn’t look so good but it will provide the necessary shelter for your garden in the meantime.  Trellis is a good option as it can support shade cloth, it will break the wind without diminishing sunlight and provides great support for you climbing plants. Picket fences are gorgeous as well  – even if you only have it on two sides.  Then you can make a little gate with an archway for a rose to climb over……

Avoid the ubiquitous Leyland cypress though. If you can’t keep it well trimmed it could turn into a 25 metre high dark monster, sucking the life and light out of your garden as well any relationship you may have had with the neighbours.  Leave those for the farm paddocks where a commercial hedge trimmer can get in.  If you already have a hedge maybe of olearia or pittosporum as many seem to be where I live, then don’t pull it out. Keep nicely trimmed and count your blessings.

Drainage

Your soil will need to be free draining and ideally not too much of a clay pan base.  Deep topsoil is of course the ideal but if you are have the choice between that and the sun I would go for the sun and put in drains. A simple way to test your soil for it’s drainage is to dig a hole about 30 cm deep and fill with water. Give it 30 mins and if the water hasn’t drained out you have a problem. If it is really bad then get some expert advice and drainage laid. Otherwise raised beds will go a long way to help. You then also have the opportunity to build up the soil in those beds by adding compost, manure, carbon etc.

Close to the Kitchen.
Another name for this sort of gardening is the Kitchen Garden and in order to use it properly it needs to be near the kitchen.  We want to eat what we grow but we don’t want to have to pack a picnic to go fetch the veges. Site it close to the back door or kitchen door so you can pop out and collect what you need for your meal. Makes it easier to slip in a bit of weeding and cultivating as well.  If the best spot in the garden has now been taken up with a BBQ and out door dining, plan your garden around that. An earth pizza oven looks gorgeous set in a vege/herb garden with the added advantage of being able to pick your herbs or tomatoes to go straight on your pizza. And a spot to have a table and chairs to sit at with  your cup of tea and survey your beautiful and productive garden is priceless.

Continuing to hurtle headlong into last century....

Continuing to hurtle headlong into last century ------- turning back the (non-digital) clock continues in our household with the recent Trademe purchase of an Olivetti Studio 46 typewriter. I had bought some really gorgeous Donna Demente printed paper from her studio in Oamaru and it just seemed wrong to either handwrite or use the computer on it. So now got my typewriter. We are going off grid at some stage so all the low tech stuff is going to be useful again.

Looked on the internet and of course found there was  a site dedicated to this model. Seriously. Here is what they had to say about this practical work of art.

Starting Out in Your Vegetable/Food Garden: Late Winter

August is a great month in this part of the world to get everything ready for the coming new season. It’s not too late to get new beds laid out and the ground prepared for your spring planting. I love the idea of turning your whole backyard into a food garden – incorporating vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, berries, nuts, herbs and flowers. Doesn’t that sound delicious? The best thing about it is that it will not only be good for you and your family but it will be good for the land itself, the birds, the insects and bees etc.  You will save money in the long run, you will know where your food comes from and what has gone into growing it, your whole family can be involved and any surplus you can share around the neighbourhood.

 My New Garden

We have recently moved to a block of land and I am also making a garden out of a bare patch of land so if you are starting out – you are not alone.  I will include some pictures and plot progress as I go along although at the moment the orchard just looks like a whole lot of sticks in the ground. We have been very lucky that not only was this piece of land previously owned by an old organic pioneer by the name of Trevor Ross, but that he ran a composting operation on it. There are piles of compost dotted over the land – gardening heaven. I know he must have used nettle as there are also lots of nettles but they have their uses.  Also planted was a good shelter belt on the south and west of the property  plus rows of native trees here and there.  There are  walnuts and pinenuts and a fruit cage that contained 100 or so cherry trees in bags. We have planted some of those out into the ground as I am not a fan of that type of growing and we have taken the opportunity to get in some gooseberries, blueberries and currants under the bird netting.

So if like me you are creating a garden from lawn or a bit of paddock then you have a great opportunity to set the foundation for a magnificent garden. Even if you are working with an existing bed or you have inherited an old patch, let me introduce you to a plan of gardening that incorporates a good level of design, utilizes the organic principles of crop rotation and permaculture, and enables you to not only feed yourselves but be a beautiful space to be in.

Some of the things to consider when designing this garden are the following;

1. Choosing your Site – Shelter and Aspect

2. Garden Size and Design

3. Marking out the beds

4. Preparing the ground – getting rid of the weeds

5. Preparing the ground – building up the soil.

Disclaimer and Short Rant

I thought now would be a good time at the beginning of the new season and at the birth of this blog to pop in a wee disclaimer.

Before I go any further let me just assure you that what I am writing is not the Bible. There is a lot of great information out there on this sort of thing and I am just a gardener who has read very widely over many years on the subject; have some design experience and get my hands dirty on a regular basis.   I shut up when I am around gnarly old gardeners and keep my ears open listening for what they have learned. Working with nature keeps you humble. I do however feel very passionately about the ordinary family’s ability to grow their own food, therefore lessening their dependence on being fed by corporations who don’t care about the earth and those of us who depend on it. Which is all of us.

And so by sharing what I know and what I am continuously learning I hope that I can make a contribution to the world – not just add more  “word emissions” to the world as Charlie Brooker talked about in his recent column in The Guardian newspaper.
I agree with him that there is just too many words out there twittering, blogging, snap-shotting, selfy- snapping, instagraming, facebooking, flickring, opining and so on.  And so to paraphrase one of my design heroes, William Morris, who once famously said “Have nothing in your house that you don’t know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” - I hope to have in this blog words that I know to be useful and hopefully help you all create something beautiful! 

Garden Notes for the Family Vegetable Garden - August

August

Starting out in the Family Vegetable Garden

August is a good time to prepare the ground for the coming season if you haven’t already done so.  Whether you are creating a new garden from lawn or a bit of paddock, working with an existing bed or an old patch, aim to make a beautiful, practical vegetable garden.  It will not only feed your family but look good all year round.  Think of the traditional cottage garden where vegetables, herbs, soft fruit bushes and fruit trees exist happily alongside shrubs, roses and perennials. You don’t need to choose between a flower garden and food garden – you can have both!

When choosing your site think shelter, aspect, soil, drainage and access. If you are turning your backyard – or front yard for that matter- into a garden you are going to want to plan some structure to keep it looking good all year round.  I have often worked with a traditional raised potager type garden which I find works well. Essentially you divide your plot into 4 rectangular beds with a central focus, surrounded by a path and then a deep border for small fruit trees and climbing plants.

Jobs for this Month.

Cultivate: Mark out new beds and if not too wet dig over ground to prepare for spring planting. Add blood & bone, lime, potash where needed and continue to incorporate animal manure and organic material to build up soil. Dig in any green crops as they will take 5-6 weeks  to rot down before planting. Still time to sow green crops in beds not in use till later (eg tomato bed)

Prepare: Seed potatoes are in the stores now so start “chitting” them. Use old egg cartons, sit each potato on end and put on in cool light space.  Another option is to plant now but protect young growth from frost when it emerges.

Sow: It’s still too early for outdoor sowing but you can start off in seed trays in a warm spot. Lettuce, cauli, cabbage, silverbeet, brussel sprouts, peas, broad beans, Later in the month: onions, beetroot, leeks, parsnips turnips, parsley,

Plant; Cabbage, Cauli, Rhubarb, Asparagus, Shallots, Garlic, Artichokes, Strawberries,