Growing vegetables or fruit in your backyard has made a comeback. Rosie Manins learns how it's done.
Jennifer Evans has always grown vegetables, as her parents did, and now her children are following suit.
''I guess it's a family thing. There's hardly any time of the year when I can't provide something from the garden.''
Mrs Evans has established three vegetable patches next to a small greenhouse on her quarter-acre Waverley section, where she and her husband have lived for about 12 years.
She grows most things from seed, starting them in the shelter of the greenhouse before transplanting them into the garden.
She has a worm farm and her own compost system, which allows her raw compost to mature for up to a year before it is used.
It is supplemented by bought compost, green manure, seaweed and sheep pellets.
Brassica do well in Mrs Evans' Dunedin garden, as do potatoes and beans.
She uses pea straw for her heather potatoes, which she lays over top pine needles.
''I always put down a layer of pine needles, because the potatoes seem to quite like the acid in them. Then I put a bit of potato feed down and lay the potatoes on top.''
She covers them with slabs of pea straw, which she mounts up as the potatoes grow.
''It makes it easier to harvest because you just roll the pea straw back, then you can dig the straw in as manure after harvest.''
Mrs Evans tried growing agria potatoes but they were not as successful as the ''consistent'' heather variety.
She plants one main crop of potatoes around Labour Weekend and they can usually be eaten in late January.
''We keep ourselves stocked with potatoes virtually about six months of the year. I freeze quite a lot of vegetables which keeps us going through winter, and any surplus we give to neighbours and friends.''
Carrots, parsnips and a bit of beetroot round out the main vegetable base along with onions, lettuces and other salad crops.
All are grown from seed and most are also planted around Labour Weekend, for eating in late summer.
There are a few strawberries and blueberries in the garden as well as parsley, garlic, rhubarb, silverbeet and asparagus, which Mrs Evans feeds with seaweed.
Tomatoes also receive special treatment - powdered milk for calcium.
''I just sprinkle about a dessert spoon of it around them every six weeks or so.''
When spring onions and leeks are ready to be transplanted, Mrs Evans cuts the tops off the green growth, so the bulk of nutrients are kept in the bulbs.
Her vegetable patches are dug between March and May, and fed in the process.
She says no vegetable should be consecutively grown in the same part of the garden, and makes sure to rotate her crops each year.
''Different vegetables take different nutrients from the soil so you don't want to keep things in the same area.''
Mrs Evans also grows vegetables at her holiday home in Wanaka.
There she finds corn, pumpkin and zucchini flourish better than in her Dunedin garden.
''The climates are different, and it's also a more silty soil up in Wanaka. Here at home it's more clay-based, although I've built it up over the years.''
Most of her Wanaka garden started in the Waverley greenhouse and has been transplanted.
''It's much nicer eating what you've grown than buying chemical-treated vegetables from the supermarket.''
Top tips
- Complement compost with green manure, seaweed and sheep pellets.
- Put potatoes on, or in, pine needles.
- Sprinkle powdered milk around tomatoes.
- Rotate crops each season.
- Cut tops off onion and leek seedlings for bigger bulbs.
- No weeds in the compost.
- Help seeds grow with a dollop of worm castings.
- Asparagus likes salty seaweed.
- Blood and bone helps activate cold compost.
