Maggie Barry
Feature
Good to grow
by Maggie Barry
Look out, pansies. Vegetables are taking over your garden patch.
The traditional Kiwi quarter acre with its huge vegetable patch and fruit trees may be a thing of the past, but more and more of us are growing our own vegetables again. Why is it suddenly so good to grow?
Unless you’re costing your labour at a lawyer’s hourly rate, it’s certainly going to save you money. Vegetables are among the easiest of plants – some are ready to harvest as little as four weeks after planting. Galvanised by chemical and health concerns, many of us have grown a few $3.99 punnets of vege seedlings organically at home – and been hooked. There’s the satisfaction of flourishing your home-grown salad or rhubarb crumble to admiring friends, and eating your own new potatoes and peas on Christmas Day. But ultimately it’s all about taste. The simple truth is that freshly picked, home-grown food tastes so much better.
Top cooks are converts – new books by Annabel Langbein and Jamie Oliver are based on producing what you cook. Peter Thornley – formerly chef at Wellington’s Icon, now head chef at Bracu in Auckland’s Bombay Hills – employs a local grower to supply the precise vegetables he wants each season. He even names the varieties on the menu.
Anecdotally, garden-centre sales of vegetable plants have taken off. New Zealand’s largest wholesale seedling nursery, Jornas Nurseries, supplies many of the major garden-centre chains and independents. In 2002, flowering annuals represented 68 percent of production and punnets of vegetable plants 32 percent. In 2006, that gap had narrowed: vegetables now account for 46 percent of business, flowering annuals 54 percent.
Even cramped apartments, courtyards and balconies can accommodate a few vegetables and lettuce varieties are clear favourites – last year more than a million punnets sold in the South Island alone. The “less is more” formula has proved a winner for small-space gardeners, and the biggest selling lines are the “Combinations” – six-packs containing two of each variety, including the “mesculin lettuce combo”, a couple of cos and red and green fancy lettuce varieties, and the “coleslaw combo”, two plants each of red and green cabbage and celery.
In response to visitor interest, Auckland Botanic Gardens are expanding their edible garden. Gardens curator Jack Hobbs has just employed a new curator, and the garden is about to be revitalised by designer Karen Lowther. Established in 1995 to inspire gardeners to use a wide range of fruit and vegetables, there’ll be more emphasis in future on permaculture and different ethnic approaches to edible gardening.
Hobbs says people are curious about traditional medicinal herbs, and “heritage”, or “heirloom”, plants in particular. There is also “phenomenal” interest in the Maori potato varieties grown, harvested and sold to visitors.
Kiwi gardeners belong to a worldwide resurgence of interest in the humble vegetable. In the Loire Valley, “Villandry”, the world’s biggest potager garden, attracts more visitors than ever. In the US, the recently launched “Edible Estates Project” urges people to rip up their front lawns, not only to grow good food, but to cultivate healthier communities. Architect Chris Haig believes that transforming the front yard into productive land reconnects people with their neighbours and breaks down “fortress neighbourhoods”.
While some have enthusiastically embraced the idea, there has been resistance from those concerned about the detrimental impact of an unkempt look on neighbourhood property values. Others are bemused as to why anyone would put messy kitchen gardens in the front instead of the back yard where they belong. One man in Queens, New York, refused to get rid of his prized front lawn saying, “It’s like not wearing a tie with your suit.”
British-born Professor John Walker has been growing vegetables for most of his 91 years, and as a newlywed in 1939, he answered his country’s call by helping to organise “Dig for Victory”. Lawns and public land throughout Britain were dug up, fertilised and replanted with much-needed vegetables to feed the nation through the war years.
After the war, he brought his expertise and his family here, where he lectured nascent farmers and horticulturists at Lincoln University (myself among them) in soil science and vegetable growing. During his decade on our television gardening show, we referred to him as our “vegetable oracle” and he continues to inspire and instruct in Christchurch where his weekly WEA classes on growing vegetables have been oversubscribed. “They can’t seem to get enough of them,” he says. “Being able to grow your own food saves a lot of money, of course, but for most of us, the main thing is the flavour. Picked and eaten within a few hours, home-nurtured vegetables just taste so much better than ones picked before they’re ripe and jostled around for days.”
Walker has been picking asparagus for the past month and every Wednesday anywhere from 10 to 20 family members (four daughters and 10 grandchildren) sit down to home-grown kale, broccoli, spinach, leeks, several varieties of lettuce, cabbage, parsnip, beetroot, potatoes … Oh, and there’ll probably be a leg of lamb or a roast chook, not that meat is ever likely to overshadow the main attractions.
Page 1 2 
