Here are our top tips for creating your first ever vegetable garden:
1. Find a good, sunny spot - ideally, the spot you choose should get good sun and be easily accessible to the kitchen.
2. Size matters - we recommend creating a garden that is around 3x4 metres big. If you make it smaller you won't have space to rotate your crops and stagger your planting for a continual supply. And if you make it bigger it may become overwhelming and too much work for a first garden. But, if you don't have space for 3x4, any size is better than nothing!
3. Raise your garden – lifting your garden off the ground will allow the soil to drain and stop it from getting too wet. You can build your own garden box - here are our tips. But you can also buy good quality, kitset garden boxes (middle picture) from places like urbanmac - we have some at the nursery we use for growing on some of our plants.
4. Fill it with good quality, friable soil (breaks apart) and dig in some compost. Head down to your local garden centre and get some friable soil to fill the box with. If you've made your garden around 3x4 metres you'll probably need about a trailer load of soil. Ask staff at the centre to point you in the right direction. They will have a big mound of local, suitable soil somewhere on-premise. If you have compost, dig some of this in now. If you'd like to learn how to make compost too, visit here.
5. Grow quick-growing seedlings that you enjoy to eat - vegetables like lettuce, courgette, cucumber, spinach, silver or rainbow beet are all fast-growing and easy to maintain. You can choose to plant whatever you like, but for a first-time gardener, we recommend staying away from onions and plants of the brassica family (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage etc) as they need a big area and a lot of time to grow.
6. Follow the instructions - on the back of each label are instructions for planting. Follow these or use our gardening guides for step-by-step planting tips for each type of vegetable.
7. Stagger your planting - for a continual supply of veges (particularly your fast-growing ones like lettuce, rocket and ones you like to eat a lot of), plant a new bundle of seedlings every couple of weeks. This will ensure the veges you like to eat are always ready to harvest. Mixed bundles like the Awapuni mixed mesclun and mixed herb varieties are great if you want a certain type of plant to always be ready to harvest but don't want too much one plant at one time.
8. Mulch it - once you've filled your new garden with seedlings, cover it with mulch like pea straw. This will help keep the weeds down and maintain moisture - especially important over summer. When you eventually harvest all your plants dig the pea straw or mulch into your garden. This will save you having to dig over your garden next time you plant seedlings.
9. Cover it - to ensure your hard work doesn't go to waste, I recommend covering your garden with bird netting or some sort of net closure. I use bird netting with a stake frame which I purchased from The Warehouse. It stops the birds getting to my veges, neighbours' cats and dogs doing their business in my garden, and our chickens from digging everything up. If the holes are small enough it may also prevent other pesky creatures like white butterfly from devouring your produce.
10. Enjoy it - You can expect to start harvesting your hard work in around six weeks.
