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.