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.