Add layers to your garden

Katrina Christison - Tidy Gardens

With Christmas only a few sleeps away, I still need to get some last-minute gifts, so I am planting salad bowls for family with busy lives in Auckland who don’t have time for a vege garden.

A salad bowl will give them homegrown freshness right outside on their deck.

I am recycling plastic pots from my nursery and buying a punnet of the following, which will give me enough plants to plant at least six salad bowls.

• Two bags of vege mix
• Six pots
• One punnet of lettuces
• One punnet of parsley
• One punnet of cherry tomatoes
• Two punnets of snow or sugar snap peas
• Six stakes for the tomatoes.

At this time of year it really starts to heat up, so your vege plants will need extra water. The heat puts them under stress and they think they need to reproduce to save themselves, so they bolt and go to seed.

In my vege garden I give them extra protection by having layers of plants planted.

What I mean by this is. I have all sizes of edibles, from mini fruit trees, to blueberries and a lemon tree. The veges are planted underneath, which gives them shade from the hot sun.  

This type of food garden is a food forest, which is a style of gardening that is based on the same concept of the layers we see in a forest.

The taller plants forming the canopy as the top layer, then the bushes (blueberry) the next layer and then the veges the ground layer.

I also add an extra layer to the ground layer to help keep the soil cooler in summer, with pea straw as the mulch.  

In my little patch, which is 20m2, I grow two mini peaches, three ballerina apples, a lemon tree, raspberries, blueberries, all sorts of herbs and then underplanted with veges.  

I would recommend looking into growing your edibles like this.

There is all sorts of information on the internet, and there are even workshops held in Ōtorohanga by the Kai Forest gardening group, but if you like your veges in neat little rows, then maybe this type of gardening isn’t for you.