When we bought our first home in West Auckland eight years ago, I had three things on my garden wishlist: a yellow magnolia, a Golden Queen peach tree and to grow as much food and flowers as I could cram into our 500sqm section. It was ours. Not that renting should stop anyone from gardening.
In the 30 or so flats I’ve lived in over the years, I’d always bought more plants than I could afford, grown bulbs in pots, seedlings on window sills and dug up sections of lawn – occasionally with the landlord’s permission (the pond wasn’t that well received but by the time the owner found out about it I’d moved to Auckland). But now, in my late thirties, I could finally plant trees and landscape to my heart’s content.
In the hot January sun, my parents helped me plant not one but four magnolias, including a yellow ‘Honey Tulip’, and a Golden Queen peach. It wasn’t easy. Not only should you plant trees in autumn or winter, but we discovered the soil was heavy clay, which is basically mud.
Clay soil turns boggy in winter and becomes so hard in summer that it develops deep cracks. On the bright side, it’s nutrient dense and roses, apple trees and mānuka thrive in it. It’s high maintenance though and needs regular applications of compost, sheep pellets and gypsum, to make it easy to plant in. So, when it came to growing vegetables and bulbs, which rot in wet clay soils, raised beds were an easier option, plus I’d fallen in love with potagers.
Traditional kitchen gardens (potager is French for soup pot) are places where seasonal vegetables, herbs, fruit and flowers mingle beautifully together, and now I had my heart set on my very own West Auckland soup pot abundant with marigolds, lush lettuces and teepees of beans and sweet peas.
We decided on a grid of six raised wooden beds, three to a side, with a pathway of stones straight down the middle, my intention being to create an illusion that the garden is larger than it looks. I think it worked, because when people who have only seen pictures of my garden visit, they comment that it looks so much bigger in the photos.
Thanks to doing a lot of chores as a kid and working at the local sawmill as a teen, my partner Jacob Leaf is very handy at DIY, so we were able to save a bit of money and build our raised beds from untreated macrocarpa rather than buying kitsets.
Years of writing about my gardening and my own experience have taught me that healthy soil really is the foundation for growing healthy plants, and the same is true for raised bed gardening. I filled mine with two-thirds compost and one-third organic veggie mix, a special growing medium with all the important nutrients for growing healthy crops.
One of the ongoing expenses with raised beds is topping up the soil, which settles over time, so I add fresh mix and compost every year. I also mix in sheep pellets in spring and autumn to add nutrients to the soil. Raised beds are essentially large pots and dry out more quickly than in-ground beds, so I always add a thick layer of pea straw as a mulch in spring and summer to lock moisture in.
Related articles:
- How to grow and care for cherry tomatoes
- How to grow passionfruit for the sweet taste of summer
- How to grow raspberries in New Zealand
- How to grow a mandarin tree from a seed
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