Gardening

Good for your health and your wallet

With living costs and food prices on the rise, sourcing fresh and natural produce from the backyard is the perfect way to keep your family’s pantry stocked. You don’t need a huge amount of space to grow your own food, whether it’s a patio with pots, raised garden beds or inground - work with what you’ve got. Here are some tips on how to get started on the road to becoming more self-sufficient.

Vegetables

• Choose the right location. You’ll need a spot that receives at least six hours of full sun per day and is sheltered from wind.

Keep frost cloth on hand for those chilly nights. Think about watering needs and the location of your water source. • Select your style of growing. There is a wide variety of garden beds to choose from, but the first point to decide on is whether your garden will be permanent or portable. If garden space is limited then utilise pots – potatoes, herbs, beans, tomatoes, lettuces and spinach all grow well in pots or buckets. • Choose what to plant. Start with what you most enjoy eating and ensure your climate is suitable to grow it. Once you have a handle on things, experiment with different and more exotic varieties. • Consider your timeframe. While it’s very rewarding to grow from seed, and often a lot cheaper, purchasing seedlings (starts) allows a little more time if you’re lacking. • Think about waste. Your kitchen waste can be seriously beneficial in the garden and utilising it will save you money. From crushed eggshells as snail repellent to coffee grinds as fertiliser, there are many ways waste can be used. Homemade compost, mulch, worm farms and bokashi bins are also a great way to reuse what is already in your garden and nothing feels better than adding some of nature’s finest materials to your garden. Great subsidies and information are available through local council websites to help you get things underway.

Fruit

While it may take time to see an abundance of produce, planting fruit trees now is a great way to ensure healthy snacks are on hand and preserves are in the pantry for years to come. • Location, think about space. Do you have a fence line but not lots of garden or grassed area? Go for trees that suit the espalier style (trained along wires down a fence line or between posts), they take up less room and it ensures most of the tree gets sunlight. • Keep soil healthy. Fruit trees grown in every climate can benefit from a mulch of some description. It adds nutrition, helps protect the root zone, limits damage done by extreme weather and makes mowing maintenance easier. • Make the most of your fruit. Eat it fresh, stew it and preserve it for fruit year-round. If preserving isn’t your style, then keep stewed fruit frozen for making quick crumbles or adding to smoothies.