Lockdown proves fertile for the green-fingered How does your garden grow?
The soil’s warming up, the frosts should be behind us, and it’s Labour Weekend. Our plots are set to thicken. By Richard Walker.
Sticks. You can never have too many sticks in your vegetable garden. Partly, that’s to show where seedlings will come up but mainly, for Hamilton woman Margi Moore, it’s to stop her two small terriers from wrecking the plants.
It may sound an idiosyncratic approach to gardening, but Moore is firm about it.
‘‘You cannot garden without sticks. It makes all the difference.’’
And it’s working. Moore has what she calls a SmUG, a small urban garden, and packs all sorts of goodness into it. At the moment, the Tuscan kale’s looking healthy, she’s down to her last cabbage or two, a leek has mysteriously come right a year or so after planting, broccoli has just finished, and she’s set to plant tomatoes. There are also parsley and other herbs, lettuces in boxes in a sunny spot on the other side of the house, coriander starting to bolt, rocket, microgreens.
Labour Weekend is traditionally the time for New Zealand gardeners to head to the garden centres in their droves and plant summer vegetables, especially tomatoes. Moore will, like so many others, spend time in the garden, but thanks to lockdown she’s not going to a garden centre and this year’s tomato plants come from a friend.
Her small garden is prolific, and it needs to be, because Moore has given herself a challenge to eat something from it every day. She’s been able to sustain the challenge for several years, and now she’s doubled down by making it public.
Since August 20, Moore has been publishing a daily photo on Facebook, showing that day’s vegetable ready to be eaten.
On August 27, for instance, she posted a photo of two daffodils and a lemon with the words: ‘‘Day 8 – it’s daffodil day and thinking of all those impacted by cancer, lucky I have the ingredients for lemonade!’’
On September 25, Day 36, a 1.3kg purple cauliflower and the comment: ‘‘I believe this is the tail of the cauli run however there are several unidentifiable brassica in the SmUG – it’s a wait and see!’’
On October 15, Day 57, a photo of dehydrated grapefruit, which made a crispy snack ‘‘to go with the countless cups of coffee I am drinking while on zoom!’’
The photos, beautifully composed and taken using an iPhone, are a lockdown project, kicking in on August 20, three days after the country went to level four.
‘‘I think it’s a good thing to do in lockdown because we’re cooped up,’’ says Moore. ‘‘So it’s a kind of a response to being cooped up as well.’’
Jan Whaley’s Hamilton garden is similarly abundant, though on a bigger scale.
Whaley reckons her vegetable garden resembles an archaeological dig. In one patch you can see what she means, with egg shells and bones strewn around on the surface.
The bones help identify areas where seeds are planted; the eggshells have survived the composting process and are now left to break down in the soil itself, adding valuable calcium. It’s all about the soil. ‘‘The thing about gardening and the actual soil is that you’ve got all the rock, the minerals from the rock that was ground up millions of years ago, to make the soil. Whereas if you build up a big high bed, and then you fill it up with stuff in bags, you don’t get the same natural sort of energy in the soil.’’
The soil gets assistance from kitchen waste and compost – like Moore, she runs a two-bin system, giving each one a year or so to break down. ‘‘I use lots of sheep manure and a little bit of general purpose because you never quite know what minerals each plant needs. I’m not a scientific gardener.’’
That last statement is arguable. Gardening in Aotearoa is typically a trial and error activity, along with a dose of observation, and sharing of experiences, which surely adds up to something closely resembling the scientific method.
And then there is knowledge passed down the line. ‘‘I mean, my granny gardened, my father gardened. It’s just sort of like breathing for me.’’
The result for Whaley, 30 years after she and her family shifted into their gully-backed suburban section, is a garden full of goodness.
At the moment, scarlet runner beans are starting to come through, telling Whaley the soil is warming up.
She’s just dug out the silverbeet, which was going to seed, there are broad beans in flower, sprouting broccoli still going, sweetpeas, five rows of lettuces, parsley (‘‘although I have to say the possums come up from the gully and love parsley, little beggars’’) a patch of rhubarb, and a lemon tree, some new silverbeet coming up which she grew from seed.
In one corner, currently fallow, there is a layer of lawn clippings used as mulch. She cautions that the layer needs to be thin – too thick a layer around a stem can kill a plant. That corner will be planted in sweetcorn and soy beans.
The idea with brassicas is to get them in just when the white butterflies are finishing off at the end of March. ‘‘You get them into the warm soil, and you get them nice and big so they mature right over the cold months.
‘‘I think the main thing is that you try and do things seasonally,’’ Whaley says. ‘‘After I’ve dug the first lot of potatoes I’ll sometimes sow carrots and parsnips, but you know you can buy a big bag of carrots for $3 and they’re all nice and clean. You’ve got to weigh up where your efforts are going to lie and I always feel that green vegetables are the things that perhaps lose their most nutrition while they’re in storage.’’
Whaley has also planted six rows of potatoes.
‘‘I’ve got some rocket, the early ones. Two of my children are married to people from Ireland so I have to give them nice early potatoes. It’s always my boast that I grow the potatoes for Christmas dinner.’’
The spuds come with legacy. Her father used to plant an eighth of an acre in maincrop potatoes when Whaley was young and she would help pick them, then rub the shoots off when they started to sprout later.
It seems an enormous amount, but none went to waste. As Whaley remarks, people didn’t really eat rice in those days unless it was in a pudding.
When it comes to legacy, Christchurch-based garden history writer Matt Morris takes the long view. ‘‘Gardening has a really long history in New Zealand, going back to at least the 13th century.’’
Food growing has been a central part of the story, he says, and is prominent in his book, Common Ground: Garden histories of Aotearoa.
When Europeans started to arrive, it was in the context of flourishing gardens and lots of food being produced, primarily ku¯ mara, taro and gourds, says Morris. ‘‘If it wasn’t for that fact, probably the colonial exercise wouldn’t have been able to happen or wouldn’t have happened the way that it did.
‘‘Usually, the people that were here were very generous in sharing their food with visitors and there was quite a lot of plant exchange that happened at that early time.’’
Ma¯ ori quickly extended their range by growing the new plants, and trading with European newcomers. ‘‘That really made it possible for more permanent European settlements to pop up. It’s not often fully acknowledged, I think.’’
Potatoes were a huge part of the story, requiring less care
than ku¯ mara, particularly further south, where communities could become more sedentary, with their crops providing not just a food source but economic power. By the 1830s Ma¯ ori were doing ‘‘huge trade’’ in potatoes with Sydney. Even the musket wars were fuelled by trading potatoes for guns, Morris says. ‘‘I think you could say by 1850 potatoes had well and truly overtaken ku¯ mara as the primary crop.’’
For her part, Pirongia woman Megan Collinson is growing potatoes for the first time this year. She’s always had a garden, but says she’s learned a lot more in the last two years after becoming manager of Palmers garden centres in Rototuna and Frankton, following a career in retail.
What has she learned in that time about the humble spud? ‘‘Put them in deeper than what you think. If you’re putting them in a trench, dig that trench deeper than what you anticipated. And they do need to get some potato food because they like to be fed, and don’t overwater them.’’
She’s yet to discover how her own crop will come on, but she’s had an important thumbs-up for her garden. ‘‘I’ve got my 87-year-old father living with me and of course he was alive in the Second World War and he said that their family wouldn’t have survived if they didn’t have a huge vege garden.’’
She remembers what he said when he saw her garden. ‘‘Oh, it looks amazing, Megs, I’m so proud of you.’’
Labour Weekend is ‘‘Christmas’’ for garden centres, she says, their biggest weekend of the year.
With frosts hopefully finished, gardeners plant summer vegetables like tomatoes and courgettes, as well as flowering perennials and annuals, she says.
Lockdown changes the drill, however. Collinson and her team have put plants in the car park for customers to choose from, as well as fetching from inside on request. It’s a challenge for staffing, and she says despite queues in the car park sales are down. ‘‘We’d love to have quadruple if not more.’’
On the other hand, Collinson also thinks lockdowns have stimulated interest in gardening – particularly vegetable growing. ‘‘We’ve had lots more people come in that have never had a vege garden before.’’ She thinks for many it’s about being more selfsufficient and knowing where their food comes from. ‘‘And something for them to do, really, as a family.’’
Waitoa woman Te Mihinga White is feeding a household of eight from her vegetable garden, while studying horticulture at Wintec.
The course is useful, with White having no background in gardening. She and her husband returned from Australia in January last year, and have created the vegetable garden from scratch.
White is growing broccoli, beans, silverbeet, lettuce, and is getting ready to plant tomatoes which she has grown from seed.
That’s where the learning from the Wintec course helps; she’s enjoying watching the whole growing process from seed to plate. The tomatoes have been so successful she will be giving some away.
Growing from seed is also a way of keeping costs down, and she is – in time-honoured gardener fashion – getting cuttings from other gardeners. For the sake of the soil, she uses no sprays, preferring to hand-weed instead.
When it comes to feeding the family, planning helps. ‘‘You put a couple of broccoli in one week, and then three weeks later put a couple more in so that you’ve got a supply.’’
But while the garden is for food, it’s also a place to have time out. ‘‘I like to go outside by myself,’’ she says. ‘‘Once you see one weed, you end up pulling out a whole lot of weeds, and you end up being outside for an hour and don’t even realise it.’’
On a very different scale, Shannon Wright has a 2600sq m plot producing greens and vegetables that she sells at the Waikato Farmers Market, online and at supermarkets and some other stores.
Her four-year-old business, Backyard Jem, grew out of her love of gardening, nurtured by growing up in a family full of fishermen and gardeners. Salad mixes and microgreens have become a staple, with two plastic houses a ‘‘life saver’’ during winter, and she grows a wide seasonal range.
It’s a relief to know even an expert can admit to the odd failure. ‘‘Sometimes I have a hit and miss with leeks and broccolis. It just depends on the season and how hot it gets because we’ve got such extreme weather changes here.’’
She uses no sprays, apart from a foliar spray with seaweed or calcium, and keeps on top of weeds with a rake-style twine weeder.
Soil health is key. ‘‘I like plants to uptake the things that they need from the soil. Because that’s where our health comes from, basically. When we look after our soils, we’re looking after our health, as in our body, but as a whole ecosystem as well.’’
Her market garden, on Hakarimata Rd between
Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia and Huntly, has a sandy loam soil which she is building up to hold water and nutrients. She is doing a lot of her own composting, and swears by vermicast from worms. She also uses liquid humates and fish hydrolysate.
This year Wright is focusing on interplanting. Tomatoes will be sharing space with other crops, including onion, coriander, dill, parsley, radishes and turnips. It means there will be understorey plants covering the soil, helping to retain moisture, while the tomatoes are growing. ‘‘I just want to see what it’ll do. It’s just better use of that space; they’re quicker crops that you can pull out before the tomatoes get massive.’’
There is a simple delight in gardening. ‘‘I love watching everything grow. I get overly excited when I see the first flower on a tomato,’’ she laughs. ‘‘I just think it brings a thrill being more in touch with nature.’’
She saw that first hand herself during an open farm tour Backyard Jem hosted just before the first lockdown last year. ‘‘There were people there that had never pulled a carrot out of the ground and hosed it off and eaten it up straight out of the ground. That kind of was like ‘wow’ for me.’’
Wellbeing, nature, gardening. They go together. Matt Morris was part of a group that last year ran a national survey of community gardens, which have been flourishing over the past couple of decades.
‘‘Provision of food was one thing. I think it was maybe the second or third most important priority,’’ he says of the responses. ‘‘But I think one of the main drivers for getting community garden projects up and running is actually about the mental health epidemic and the problems that we have with social isolation, even in a suburban context where people are surrounded by people. There’s still a lot of loneliness. And community gardens are a great space to bring people together. It’s very simple. You know, there’s the whole garden therapy element of it as well, but just a very levelling, neutral, unjudgmental space for people to rock up to and meet other people.’’
Morris talks about an era of garden ‘‘de-skilling’’ starting in the 1970s. There were a variety of reasons, including the availability of produce year round in supermarkets along with reduced section size. The knowledge, passed on from one generation to the next, withered on the vine.
The rise of community gardens, along with a return to gardening in primary schools, is helping drive reskilling, he says. There may be a further imperative, he thinks, in the context of Covid, as well as climate change. ‘‘These things are massively disruptive. So they’re an opportunity for re-localisation and resilience. But it’s actually just a reality. We’re going to have to get our act together around not relying on fruits and veges coming quickly from all over the world to our doorstep. Increasingly, we are needing to figure out how to do that for ourselves.’’
Both Margi Moore’s parents were gardeners on a quarter acre plot, and she remembers only ever eating home-grown vegetables. Her mother, a child of the Depression as Moore describes her, would also do a lot of preserving. ‘‘It’s that waste not, want not kind of mindset.’’
Moore says she has her own version of her mother’s approach, and has always liked the idea of living off the land. That’s not possible in a city, but her garden is like an urban version, she says. But there’s more to it than that. There’s the way in which a broccoli flower can appear overnight, for instance, or the way the beautiful broad bean flowers give rise to pods. ‘‘It’s the surprise, and then the being patient – you know, you have to be very patient for things to become ready. I like that aspect of the garden. It’s a fascinating place to be and it responds to the seasons.’’
And there’s more again. ‘‘You can only be the gardener while you’re in the garden. You can’t be other things, and that’s what I like about it. All you are is a gardener for that period of time and everything else is forgotten. Gardening is like a happy place. It’s a kind of gentle place to be.’’
‘‘Gardening has a really long history in New Zealand, going back to at least the 13th century.’’
Matt Morris