A Green Granny's Garden

introduction

To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe,

   to plant seeds and watch their renewal of life —

this is the commonest delight of the race,

the most satisfactory thing a man can do.

Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900),

American essayist and novelist

Adisplay tent at the Grey Lynn Park Festival caught my eye. It had engaging photographs of vegetable gardens and happy gardeners displayed around the tent sides, cushions on the ground; hippyish. Anna and Pierre chatted to festival-goers. And there were seedlings available in exchange for a koha.

The Grey Lynn Park Festival is held every November. Market stalls have New Zealand-made goods, and showcase the works of New Zealand artists, painters, sculptors and designers, along with produce stalls. It’s a chance for people to bring their products and their passions to the public. Community groups and clubs get the chance to do some fundraising and profile themselves. Grey Lynn Community Gardens have a tent promoting their gardens and letting the public know what their organic community garden is all about.

When I tell friends about my new-found patch of land, most of them have never heard of community gardens. I hadn’t either in New Zealand until I came upon my one. I’ve seen allotments in England, and love train journeys there where I see the back views of homes where there are flourishing tiny private gardens and occasionally large, neat allotments. I don’t know how many community gardens there are here; when I check the internet I see incomplete lists of gardens inviting new ones to add their addresses; they are clearly popping up all the time. But before I joined mine, I did not know of any and believe that not many other people do either.

Near ours is the new Wilton Street garden that started a year ago as a Grey Lynn 2030 project. GL2030 is part of the ‘transition town’ movement in response to climate change, peak oil (when the supply runs out), etc. It aims to have a sustainable and vibrant community by 2030, with a focus on waste reduction, food production, farmers’ markets, community gardens, traffic calming, and more. The Wilton Street garden is on what had been a patch of heavily overgrown, jasmine-tangled land that had lain vacant for years. It took six months to clear, and now has stretches of garden, raised planter beds and a picket fence. Behind an old trellis, a wilderness area has been left for native flora and fauna. As I write, the gardeners are in the process of developing a community composting station and establishing a permanent water supply using donated tanks connected to the spouting of an adjacent shop. I joined a garden that had started like that, too, but am lucky that I have inherited years of work that has already established it.

Overseas experience shows that there are many reasons why members of a community come together and create a garden. Some reasons can be loosely described as ecological; others as social or community development. Overseas, community gardens provide places for socializing and relaxing; in New Zealand most people still have access to open spaces to relax. Overseas, seats, play areas and art have been added to gardens to increase their value as community centres, and the activity of gardening brings people together from across the social strata, building stronger, more integrated communities. At our gardens, there is an adjoining children’s play area on church land; our art is a set of low-flying ceramic ducks, a rusty horseshoe and sometimes a fabric banner; and there are no seats — but I love it. For me, the rewards are fresh vegetables, recreation and probably therapy — I always leave feeling better than I did when I arrived. It’s made me more environmentally aware, too.

Living in a second-floor apartment of a large apartment block I have no garden — lots of edibles in pots on two balconies, but no soil to really get my hands into. I’ve thought for years that a veggie garden might be a retirement goal, but didn’t dream that there could be a plot with my name on it just around the corner.

After talking to Anna and Pierre at the festival, I decide to go along to the community gardens for their weekly ‘Growing Together’ gardening session. I asked if I could have a plot of my own. No, sorry, none available, but I’d be welcome to come and muck in at the joint communal gardens, meet some people, hang out, and share veggies. Living nearby, I am surprised that I have never heard of these gardens. They are secreted behind the community hall, on Saint Columba church land.

Needing no persuasion, I walk up on the dot of 2pm the next day. Only James is there. A Jesus lookalike, he welcomes me and we wander around. The place looks a bit dishevelled. The veggies are not in neat rows; instead, there is a haphazard potpourri with every space covered. And weeds … Don’t they weed? No, not much. They prefer to keep the earth covered rather than laid bare. Those weeds that are pulled out are furiously chopped up and thrown back on the surface. Also, Jesus eats weeds. A vegan, he has a wide knowledge of what’s edible and what’s not, and their nutritional properties.

Other people turn up and are briefly introduced; the atmosphere is laid-back and friendly. I am pointed towards a communal plot where I can muck in. I have brought some of my own garden tools along. It’s unclear whether anyone is in charge, and there is minimal advice given about what to do — as I say, it is a very laid-back atmosphere — and now I am in the deep end. I wonder if they think I am an experienced gardener. I help clear, chop up weeds, dig, and plant courgettes and onions. I sneak a look at others and think I am doing OK.

Times are flexible, people wander in and out, and at the vague end of our session Anna invites me for ‘a forage’. I don’t like to just help myself, so she wanders around chopping off bits for me. I am chuffed to have fresh broad beans — I haven’t eaten them for years. She picks me a bunch of periwinkle-blue phacelia flowers. I have never seen these before. They grow it at the community gardens to attract bees. I am not familiar with ‘insectary’ plants. I amble off with the veggies, and Anna runs down the road after me to deliver the flowers that I forgot to take. I am knackered and happy, and know I will return the following week; the thought that I could eat my own-grown veggies every week is tempting.

I seem to just settle into the gardens, and recall my childhood when a large veggie garden was an essential part of many Kiwis’ home lives. Eve and Ray Hill were fabulous gardeners, and were also my parents. I guess many Kiwi baby boomers could say the same of their parents. Every weekend I recall the transistor radio with a sports match droning, and keeping Mum and Dad company in the garden. The flower garden was Mum’s domain, with me acting as a spy if Dad ventured into it. But the veggie garden was a joint venture, although Mum was the true ‘green-fingered’ gardener. She also had an eye for unusual veggies and tried them out.

The glasshouse was built and tended by Dad, and grew grapes, cucumbers and tomatoes productively. There have never been tomatoes again that tasted like Dad’s. I don’t bother with them much now — I have found nothing to compare since. I wonder if it is sentimental imagination, but I don’t think so. That smell that comes from the stalks, too, transports me to Sunday ‘tea’ with finely sliced lettuce salad, sliced boiled egg and those heavenly tomatoes. Highlander mayonnaise too — I think Mum made a boiled one that was purported to be superior. What a strange concoction that was, but I liked it at the time. Bacon-and-egg pie with Mum’s own home-made pastry. Delicious. Mum and Dad joined that informal Kiwi competition to have new spuds and fresh-picked peas for Christmas Day … a rivalry amongst friends to make sure we could boast that they were ready for Christmas dinner.

Mum was the outside gardener (as opposed to the glasshouse gardener), both veggies and flowers. She loved experimenting with unusual veggies — kohlrabi, salsify, kale. We had a cabbage once that grew so large we could sit on it like a one-legged stool. Too big for us; Mum gave it to an orphanage. A friend, Mr Baker, came to collect it on his bicycle and wobbled off down the road doubling the huge cabbage to deliver it. I recall Mum having buckets of stinking seaweed gunk fermenting behind the garden shed, but, of course, I never noticed what she did with it. I was too busy doing nothing. She used to keep a spade and sacks in the boot of our car, and long-suffering Dad was made to stop the car if we spied cow or horse manure on the country roadside. Ever frugal, she used to ladle soapy water out of the washing machine to sprinkle on the greenfly on her chrysanths.

Mum used to enter veggies in competitions, and often won prizes. I have some prize certificates in my name, but the growing of the produce seems to have slipped my memory. Once I had a school project to plant a tiny veggie garden. I recall that the school inspector came to see it, and there was nothing to see! Dad must have had to invent some excuse, or probably just told the truth: lack of interest from his dilatory daughter. I have a grand medal in a silk-lined case awarded to my grandfather for ‘Points Prize, Vegetables Section, HB A&P Society, 1915’. My sister, Shirley, is a superb gardener, both flowers and veggies, and so is my cousin Ray in Dunedin — an organics king.

I loved Mum’s flower garden, and learnt a lot from her about her plants. I was encouraged to pick her treasures and arrange them. I recently found, neatly pasted in the back of Mum’s moth-eaten, felt-covered recipe book, some newspaper clippings of flower-show entries. There were quite a few firsts for Mrs R.C. Hill and some for Fionna Hill. And a footnote which said: ‘The judge of the decorative section Mrs F.P.E. Smith said she was impressed by the novelty container of flowers entered by Fionna Hill. A combination of grasses and small lilies in green and autumn tones, the entry was combined in a small vegetable marrow.’ I later became a florist.

I learnt very little from my parents about gardening, but certainly had the benefits of it. Somehow this stuff must have been in my genes and emerged later. I must have unconsciously absorbed some things, because I catch myself doing things that I learnt somewhere — like staking the broad beans at several levels inside an enclosure. Or tying a length of string between two sticks to make a straight planting line. I still use all my parents’ old gardening tools, and believe that they bring me good fortune. Mum’s hoe is worn down on one side — by her, not me.

Our family had a bach at the Opihi river; we called it a hut, and that is really what it was. I slept in the porch which had an unlined, corrugated-iron roof and a double stable door. Tucked up warm as toast on a kapok mattress with a hottie and listening to rain on that roof is a warm, fuzzy, cocooning memory. Mum and Dad even had a vegetable garden there, and Dad pruned the huge macrocarpa hedge and mowed the lawns. It was no holiday for them.

In the productive garden, carrots grew like missiles; they must have liked the silty soil accumulated over years of flooding. Amazing crops thrived — tomatoes, huge parsnips, enormous lettuces and Savoy cabbages, very yummy new spuds at Christmas. When I asked Shirley what she recalled, she remembered the peas that had huge pods that went pop when you pressed them, and were so sweet and tender she used to chew the juice out of the pods. She said she has never seen the variety since, and doesn’t know the name now.

Autumn crocuses popped out from under the hut every year. And water came from out of the sky or from a hand pump which we had to prime. Salmon, brown trout, flounder and whitebait were all caught by Dad, a great angler. I squirm when I think that I didn’t like to eat fish then.

Then there was the mushrooming; the only time my brother Malcolm and I willingly got out of bed at daybreak. We raced up the road to the paddock and tried to beat Mrs Cooksley, from over the road, to the crop that had popped up overnight. Pink insides and a damp, white top from the dew. Then home to peel them, and Mum cooking them with bacon on a coal range — her only form of stove at the hut. I can recall Mum once taking a case of peaches that she’d bought at Morton’s Auctions, plus preserving jars and accoutrements, and proceeding to preserve all the fruit indoors in the hut — in 100° Fahrenheit!

I can’t recall much R&R there for Mum and Dad, but plenty for my brother and me — mucking about in our dinghy, fishing, bird-nesting, making and flying kites, and baking potatoes in driftwood fires on the beach and throwing in those dry seaweed pods that pop. Idyllic.

december

Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

Michael Pollan (1955–),

American activist and writer

After three weeks of communal gardening I am elated to be offered a spot of my own; I must have been doing something right! Pierre looks startled when he sees I immediately clear it except for three asparagus clusters. He is a mulch maniac. I ask if it is OK (too late); he replies, ‘Yes, if you have a plan.’ What plan? Of course I don’t — I just wanted to put my stamp on the plot. I nervously douse the surface with grass clippings, coffee grounds, and an ethanol by-product that has an appealing alcoholic smell. That looks better.

I have inherited a spot that has had vetch growing. We all cut off the tops and throw them in the compost — apparently it is the roots that provide nitrogen to the soil. Vetch is a strong, trailing legume, native to the Mediterranean. It draws nitrogen from the air, trapping it in the roots, and in that way improves soil fertility. Actually, in the past my spot has been used by Adrian, a great gardener, and I have the impression that he knows what’s what about gardening. So I’m fairly pleased with the patch. Adrian works and gardens at nearby Kelmarna Gardens, but still calls by our gardens and comes to our shared meals and celebrations like solstice.

I help myself to tomato and silverbeet plants from a sort of lucky-dip tangle. After two weeks I’m picking silverbeet. Rocket, grown from seed, is ready to pick after the same period of time. Pumpkin seedlings are coming up all over the place. I planted one in the centre of my plot, knowing that it would become huge, so I put up a high bamboo tripod and within weeks have a pumpkin ‘tree’. I soon need a ladder to be able to attach shoots to the top. I build a crude lattice, which has my scarlet runners up it and waving in the air searching for longer spikes within weeks. I think I’m rather stylish to plant mint in a buried large broken flowerpot. Knowledgeable fellow gardener Adrian (yes, it’s obvious now that he knows a thing or two) points out that the pot will not contain the invasive mint. Uh oh.

The tomatoes from the lucky-dip heap are a mismatched collection. I confidently nip out the side shoots, only to find that cocktail varieties don’t like this. To the gardens I donate my poor kaffir lime tree, which had been languishing in starved potting-mix in a too-small pot on my balcony. It is transplanted and flourishes — within weeks it has glossy, soft, huge new leaves. It must be in plant paradise. I invert a pretentious clay flowerpot atop a bamboo tepee that’s waiting for the snow peas to climb up. I’ve seen these in English potagers and they look cool. But in a hippy jungle?

Seeds are saved from the garden, and a few are bought. Friends give seeds, too. I place an order through Kings Seeds’ catalogue for some special things I want. The quaint potting shed is like a dusty furnace and has masses of planted seeds and seedlings. Seeds sprout quickly. My bean seeds were ready to plant out in 10 days. I eat an imported rock melon and plant its seeds; they surprise me by coming up! Then Jesus points out that these plants require too much water. We don’t have a large supply. Water is collected from the adjoining church-hall roof; there is no connection to the mains. We transport it via watering cans. I notice how much more careful I become about wasting water. I throw the melon seedlings out.

The worm farm is a huge line of five old household baths with hinged lids of corrugated-iron sheets. It has a pipe underneath, connected to the bath plugholes and running to a bucket from which we can scoop ‘worm tea’. No prissy little worm trays on legs like you find in suburban backyards. The ‘tea’ looks like delicious black coffee. There are signs attached to the front of each bath saying either Please feed us or Please don’t feed us. From now on, this is where my organic kitchen waste goes. There’s a permanent cloud of fruit flies around my kitchen. Sometimes distinctive fermenting smells, too.

On a trip to Northland I gather four bags of seaweed. I cautiously tip one bag of seaweed into a wheelie bin containing a murky liquid with blobs of horse poo bobbing around in it. I empty another bag into a huge bucket, fill it with water, cover it and will wait for ‘sea pee’ to develop. I heave some seaweed straight on to my plot … a white salt-ring develops and I yank it off. There are different theories about whether to wash the salt off first. I can’t be bothered; scarce water is a good excuse.

Buckets of used organic coffee grounds are delivered and sprinkled over the ground … rich, brown and fine. An ethanol by-product is delivered in cheesecloth bags. It has a deliciously alcoholic scent. It, too, is sprinkled all over the garden. It is like making a rich Christmas cake. Hardly a surprise that everything flourishes!

Christmas arrives, and I sadly abandon my plot for a while.

january

Despite the gardener’s best intentions, Nature will improvise.

Michael P Garofalo,

American garden enthusiast

Back at the gardens after the Christmas break, I plant celery seedlings, dwarf beans, beetroot, leeks, lettuces, radishes and a little basil, as there’s masses of basil planted in the communal garden. My aubergines look miserable. The Port Albert cucumber from Koanga is dead; my tomatoes are thriving, but bushy and falling all over the place.

The Vietnamese mint I have planted in a huge bowl planter (as it is invasive) is thriving, but needs a lot of our scarce water. I am picking runner beans; I have read to remove the lower leaves from tomatoes to let the sun in to ripen the fruit. So I do so.

We have a working bee to remove the pathway bark chips, dig the earth underneath, spread it on the garden, fill the hole with donated mulch and cover it again with bark chips. It’s a huge job that is shared. Jenny is wielding a pickaxe; Pierre is steaming perspiration. The path now looks like a long, freshly dug