Veggie garden - Finally...

After planning to have a veggie garden at our last 2 houses, we have actually acted on our plans this time and are committing to making it a reality this time. There are a number of factors which have prompted this including:

• Availability of water - water in NZ is not an issue (well not at the moment), the water restrictions/lack of natural rainfall to water the garden was on of the drawbacks to us starting a veggie garden in Brisbane (having to bucket water when pregnant or the busyness of babies is not encouraging). The Waikato gets reasonable rainfall and is known for it's fertile soil.
• Budget -The price of veggies in NZ supermarkets is a bit more expensive than Australia and there is no Rocklea Markets equivalent to get cheap fruit and veg from, so any saving we make by growing some of our vegies ourselves is an insentive
• The availability of produce - because of NZ's small size and southerly location, the availability and cost of various fruit and vegies is very dependant on seasonal availability. So I will have to plan my meals around vegies that are in season, so a might as well grow some of them myself.
• Reducing our Carbon footprint - now don't be scared that I'm turning into at fanatical Greenie or anything. Just with what I've been reading lately about simple ways to reduce our impact of the environment, I have been thinking that I may as well do what I can where I can (taking care of the world God has given us, like he comanded us to do). So as far as growing the vegies contribute to this, I'm reducing the food miles of our vegies - not transport invovled except for carrying them from the garden bed into the kitchen; by only growing vegies on a small scale I will be able to use more environmentally friendly ways to water and feed the plants than what the majority of commercial growers use. I'm sure there is others, but I can't think of any right now (although I plan to post sometime later what other things I'm consiously doing to reduce our Carbon footprint).

Anyway back to the actual construction and planting of the vegie patch. With the help of some photos I'll show you the progress so far...

This is the original state of the garden bed (patch of weeds would be a better description) - bottom right corner of photo:
It's under the kitchen window and that is our front door to the left and we are also planning to get an outdoor table for the concrete there to eat outside during the long, sunny, summer evenings.


Then with a combined effort from Peter, Ben and I we dug out all the weeds and removed all the small garden ornaments we found in the process (which were found buried under the surface):





After a trip to the local Bunnings (well actually there is only 1 Bunnings in Hamilton), we started on adding a wooden border to the garden. This is so we can build up the bed a bit with a bag of compost and so the kids don't accidently drive their bikes into it and squash all the plants. We didn't buy enough stakes to support it so it will have to be finished after yet another trip to Bunnings (we had to make an extra trip this morning to buy nails to secure the planks to the stakes).


You might be asking yourself what we are going to plant in it. Well I am venturing out into the area of 'seed raising'. Whenever I've bought herbs to plant at home I've always bought the little ones in the punnets, half because I'm impatient and half because I feel there is more room for failure trying to grow from seed. Whenever we planted seeds to grow at school for various things, mine used to frequently fail to sprout, so I don't have much confidence in my seed raising ability. But it is a lot cheaper to buy a packet of seeds than to buy seedling, especially for vegies where you need to replant as you use it eg. Shallots. So I've started small with Zucchini, Shallots and Spinach planted in the egg carton sitting on our kitchen window sill waiting for them to sprout (that takes 7-10 days so I have a little wait)I'll keep you updated on progress.