Christchurch
Having vegans in the family makes for lively discussions at dinner. And it had me recoiling as I reached for the blood and bone at the garden centre recently.
How does one manage vegan gardening, wonders Mary Lovell-Smith
With animal products out of bounds for vegan gardeners, what do they use? “Certainly not blood and bone!” Fiona Horgan, who has a micro-organic farm near Oxford in the North Canterbury foothills, is almost spluttering down the phone. “I don’t think I would ever use it even if I weren’t vegan,” she laughs. “All those antibiotics.”
Some gardeners replace nitrogen-rich blood and bone with alfalfa sprouts. These pellets are readily available in New Zealand as rabbit food and supply a good balance of all the three wonder elements of plant life: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK). Others will employ the slower-acting, but cheaper, green manure to get nitrogen, especially a mix rich in leguminous crops such as alfalfa, broad beans, crimson clover, peas and vetch.
Manure is nitrogen-rich but is usually another no-no for Fiona. “I never use any manure from any animal leading a stressed life,” she explains. “I only ever use horse manure from an organic rescue place down the road which gives the animals a lovely time for the rest of their natural lives.”
She uses mainly seaweed, compost and comfrey. Her seaweed is gathered straight from the coast and either composted, applied directly onto the soil or made into a fertiliser tea by soaking in water. (Seaweed fertilisers, especially kelp-based ones, are rich in potassium. They are readily available in garden centres but many bought ones also contain fish.)
Like seaweed, comfrey can be added to a fertiliser tea or composted. This useful plant grows readily in most situations. Its long roots mine a host of nutrients from the soil, and especially potassium (it can have up to three times more potassium than manure). Wood ash is a source of phosphorus too, says Jessie Reilly. The Canterbury vegan lacks a fireplace in her current house, but she thinks all the banana skins and grains and nut scraps she puts in her compost will laden it with enough of the element.
A problem facing gardeners of all creeds is pests.
Animal lover Jessie is philosophical about them. “Insects have as much right as we do to live and I really don’t believe in killing any living creatures if I can help it,” she says.
She has adopted the plant-another-apple-tree-for-the-birds and a-row-o-fcabbages-for-the-white-butterfly approach. Even aphids on her roses do not bother her. “I once tried to wash them all off wth the hose,” she says. “But I felt a bit bad about it.”
She believes that by having a garden with a diverse range of both ornamental and edible plants, beneficial and annoying insects will be kept in balance, with no “great onslaught of pesky ones decimating my crops.”
For Fiona, whose livelihood in part depends on raising crops, combatting insects without killing them becomes a tactical manoeuvre. She says the farm can have “massive white butterfly problems”. While her husband is happy to chase them off with a squash racquet, she prefers a less physical technique. “I use a plastic or horticultural net cloche as soon as I plant anything and leave it on for the duration,” she says. “Then there are no problems.”
Oxford’s damp nights and warm days seem ideal breeding conditions for leaf miners that feast on her rocket and mizuna type greens. “So I just plant outside their cycle and then cloche the plants,” she adds.
To discourage other insect pests, Fiona will also plant whole beds in marigolds, turn it over, digging them in, then plant, and once again cloche up speedily.
Digging a garden or turning it over is often eschewed by gardeners – vegan and non-vegan alike – not least because precious worms are liable to fall victim to the blade of a spade or prong of a fork. To mitigate disruption to her soil, Fiona has a tilther; this tool turns over only the top 2.5cm of the soil.
Jessie also has a no-dig garden. She says it is a result of learning to be more realistic and less idealistic than she was in her 20s when she explored Jainism. “Its belief that you should do no harm to any living creature really fascinated me,” she says. “My beliefs have morphed really into being as caring as I can to all plants and animals.”
Fiona and Jessie both maintain that not hurting other creatures is not hard to do as a gardener.
But Fiona points out it is harder as a consumer. “It’s all very well being organic and vegan, and not wearing leather shoes, but then you realise that imported synthetic ones have travelled across the world in a container ship which are the leading cause of whale deaths.”