Go Greener, Australia

After showing off our vegie garden in the blog the other week, and making all of our visitors come out to take a look at it, I’ve had a few people ask me why we started growing our own vegetables, and if it was very hard to do. Dave and I had been talking about it for years, but when we read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, she made it sound so good that we decided to just get stuck into it.

Step 1: Prepare your soil

One Saturday morning Dave pulled out an old, purple-flowered plant that hadn’t been doing well in the corner of our garden. Then he dug in some of our compost - see Greenfoot’s compost instructions too. We decided that was good enough, but we’re pretty lazy. If you aren’t in a hurry you could also put down some weed mats, or add water-retaining crystals to the soil.

Step 2: Choose your plants

We dithered a bit over which fruit and vegies to try, but it’s a no-brainer really: just choose your favourite foods. I’ve loved beetroots ever since I tried a Jamie Oliver recipe. Supermarket tomatoes taste bland, so I thought we could do better (and we did!). Basil seemed like a good bet to go with tomatoes, and apparently they grow well when planted together. Lemon and limes were an easy choice, since we use lots of lemons (lemon linguine, lemon roast chicken, honey and lemon drinks for winter colds), and Dave and I both like to drink Mojitos. Strawberries were Dave’s choice, since they’re his favourite fruit.

Step 3: Put ‘em in the ground

We picked up the plants from Bunnings and popped them into the ground based on the instructions on the little plant tags. Later, we got some stakes to keep the tomato bushes upright. Add some mulch to keep the moisture in the soil where it belongs - we got a bunch of pea straw from Farmer Jack’s and just kinda spread it around. We put the lemon and lime trees in half-wine-barrels from Waldecks.

Step 4: Maintenance

Perth has water restrictions, so the plants get the regulation 2 days of sprinklers a week. In-between, we sometimes hand-water them after work - and by “we”, I mean “Dave”. When he did the watering, he’d check for any bugs or weeds. Once, there were some bugs on the tomatoes, so Dave used an organic pesticide from Bunnings, and they went away.

That’s pretty much it - so far, everything is doing fine apart from the beetroot, which just didn’t seem to grow much. Peter Cundall from Gardening Australia could point out all sorts of flaws with how we’ve done it (I’m sure he’d want us to use more manure), but I think we learn best by actually doing something, even if we take a few tries to get it right.

Why is growing your own food good for the environment?

By growing some of our own fruit and vegies, we make it easy to reduce the eco-impact of our food: of the 6 ways to make your food eco-friendly, growing your own vegies helps with 5 of them. Food from our backyard is about as local as it gets, we know it’s seasonal because we harvest as soon as things ripen, we control the amount (if any) of pesticides and fertilisers used, there’s no packaging involved, and it motivates us to learn how to cook from scratch. So far we’ve learned mostly about cooking tomatoes (bruschetta, pasta sauce, baked with sausages, in salads, etc), but I’m looking forward to trying new things as we go along.

So if you’re not happy with what’s on offer at your supermarket, dig out a plant in your garden that you don’t like, and stick something tasty in there instead. Water it, stick some mulch on it, and see how it goes

Tags: food, vegetable garden

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 5:53 pm and is filed under food, garden. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.