Edible garden
This mum-anddaughter duo prove you don’t need lots of land to produce an impressive bounty
Is this Auckland’s most productive plot?
Four years ago, there was a stretch of neatly mown lawn in front of the Kundu’s family bungalow – but you wouldn’t know it today
Anita Kundu and her mother Sue have turned their ordinary suburban garden in the south Auckland suburb of Manukau (just 20-odd minutes from the CBD!) into a sprawling and tangled food forest. There’s very little space for left grass now. Instead, beneath towering walls of sunflowers, there’s a plethora of vegetables, fruit and other flowers, many of them growing in the hundreds of containers and buckets dotted around the section.
It has undoubtedly been a massive transformation, but Anita, 36, started small. When she took over the garden after the death of her father Joe, the first thing she planted was an oriental lily called ‘Hotspot’, in his memory.
“Dad had been in bad health for a while but still had a small vege patch, mostly at the back of the house, where he grew things such as leeks and broccoli,” explains Anita. “After he passed away, I started gardening again and it was kind of like therapy for me.”
It wasn’t long before the man who mowed their lawns was called in to start digging them up. Anita, who had loved helping her parents in the garden as a child, had rediscovered her passion for growing things. And once she had the bug, she couldn’t help planting more and more.
“We did it in stages,” she says. “At first it was a weekend hobby for me and something I might do for an hour in the evenings. I love nature and enjoyed having this little haven I’d created to potter round in.”
Very soon Anita and Sue discovered that their home is set on fertile soil and were rewarded with ample crops of fresh veges for Anita to harvest and Sue to put to use in the kitchen. Their plot has now expanded to reach the property’s boundaries and Anita has had to start exploring the possibilities offered by vertical gardening to create more space.
It’s a time-consuming passion. Every morning in the dry summer months sees Sue out watering for up to two hours. Meanwhile, Anita can sometimes find herself absorbed in her garden tasks from dawn till dusk, only breaking for meals.
The tiled patio area at the back of the house has been turned into a nursery where she raises seedlings for the next cycle of crops. There’s a sheltered, narrow passage down one side of the house with a thriving passionfruit vine, where Anita is experimenting with crops such as bitter melon and loofah, as well as growing lots of herbs. However, it’s the unfenced front yard that’s the real area of cultivation.
“I use the garden beds there for things that really need to go into the ground, such as potatoes and kumara, and crops that sprawl, such as melons and pumpkins,” explains Anita. “Tomatoes are also okay in the ground, but I struggle to grow things such as eggplants, capsicum, okra and chilli; I’ve noticed they do much better in pots. The temperature is warmer and pots can be moved into sunnier spots when the weather cools. It’s also a good way to save space.”
Anita aims to be as self-sufficient as possible, not just because it keeps the
grocery bills down, but because she firmly believes homegrown is healthier. Both she and Sue suffer from Type-2 diabetes.
“We’ve noticed a huge difference as we’ve been able to eat more out the garden,” she says. “Neither Mum nor I are on any medication. We’re able to control our blood sugar with a good diet and exercise.”
When fresh and spray-free, everything is tastier, adds Anita, who finds it worth going the extra mile for harder-to-produce crops.
“Melons are difficult because the flowers have to be pollinated by hand – and it takes hours. This year I told Mum I was never growing them again as it was just too much work. Then we ate two rock melons that were so sweet and juicy, and I knew I could never buy anything like that from a shop.”
While there is some investment in materials, such as container mix and fertiliser, Anita is a great bargainhunter. She snaps up pots on special and lots of crops are planted in blue plastic buckets that are cheap from hardware stores. She also takes cuttings and saves seed, often swapping with other gardeners. The result is a hugely varied plot with 11 types of eggplant alone, including ‘White Star’ and the long, thin ‘Asian Bride’.
“The list of seeds I sowed for spring and summer this year is 20 pages long. You’d think I had a large amount of land the way I carry on!” she laughs. “It’s quite easy to get carried away. I tend to sow more than I need in case they don’t germinate.”
Anita’s wary of more exotic varieties being discontinued, which is another reason she’s keen on saving seed. “In the early years I focused on things like peas and beans, which dry on the vine and are probably the easiest to save. Sometimes we let the lettuce selfseed. That’s why some areas of the garden look untidy – I’m making an effort to let things go to flower.”
After a trial with sunflowers a couple of seasons ago, Anita found her own saved seeds germinated more successfully than the packet ones she’d bought, so now lots of the giant flower heads are covered with paper bags so they can dry out without the birds making a meal of them.
There are plenty of other flowers crammed into this garden too. Anita loves her annuals, such as zinnias, marigolds and petunias, as well bulbs such as dahlias and lilies, and there’s an impressive king protea to remind Sue of her South African roots.
A real passion is standard roses – and Anita has quite a collection. “‘Just Joey’ is probably my favourite because my aunt bought that for us in memory of Dad; it’s a beautiful apricot with ruffled petals. I also love ‘Blackberry Nip’, which is my favourite purple rose, and I’ve recently ordered a selection of David Austins.”
The roses, a lemon tree, some hydrangeas and an asparagus bed are among the few constants in a garden that changes dramatically from season to season. Over winter the beds will be planted with lowergrowing crops such as broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower, leek and celery to be used in soups, and carrots, which always go well in buckets over the colder season.
“In winter the garden looks tidier because we don’t have so much sprawling over the edges,” says Anita.
Since the land is farmed so intensively year-round, she’s careful to keep adding lots of compost and sheep pellets to the garden beds and regular feeds of liquid fertiliser to the containers.
Anita aims to be as self-sufficient as possible both to keep the bills down and because she firmly believes homegrown is healthier
“It’s definitely been a learning curve and some seasons have been better than others,” she says. “A couple of years ago, I tried growing potatoes in buckets and that wasn’t as good. But there haven’t been any real disasters – hence Mum has allowed me to dig up more and more of her lawn.”
Pests aren’t a huge problem, aside from an ongoing battle with slugs and snails attacking things like the tender young cucumber and zucchini plants.
“I like planting things close together – not just because I’m greedy and I want the volume, but also because I have a problem with kikuyu grass that wants to creep in.”
The gratification Anita gets from planting a seed and watching it grow and then fruit is a big part of the pleasure of her garden. But in an era when we’re increasingly focused on our smartphones and computer screens, she also appreciates the simplicity of being outdoors and enjoying the seasons.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-technology,” she says. “But you can’t eat a smartphone. At the end of the day, we all have to eat no matter what world we live in, and massproduced, highly processed food simply isn’t good for you.”
Passersby often stop to chat to Anita while she’s working in her garden, and some neighbours have asked to buy veges. What she’d prefer is to help them create their own gardens and learn the basics of growing veges. “Then if they want to, they can expand the way we have.”
Anita and Sue’s own garden was starting to seem too much for the pair of them to handle and it was disheartening to get to the end of a long day and still not have all the tasks finished, so this summer they took in some WWOOFers. So far they’ve hosted a French couple and two young American women with a background in sustainability.
“We’ve found it’s made us even more organised and efficient, and we’ve really enjoyed having some downtime from the garden.”
There’s still potential to improve. Anita has plans to add an arch or pergola for climbing ‘Dublin Bay’ roses and hopes to install a glasshouse in an area currently occupied by an disused spa. She’d like to build a raised bed in an area where the soil seems to have been depleted by the roots of a large willow tree. And she’s excited about soon adding a mini-orchard of dwarf fruit trees, some of which she’ll grow in large pots.
“If it sounds like I don’t have a life and that everything revolves around the garden, to a certain extent that’s true,” she laughs. “I don’t think you could have this kind of garden if you didn’t love it.”