Faye Slater's Gardening Column - Beginners

Starting a Veganic Garden
This article aims to encourage Vegans who have not had a garden before, to give it a try. The benefits are significant:

• Personal empowerment over the quality of food you eat.
• An immensely rewarding hobby and fun to do with children.
• Fresh food from garden to plate is more nutritious.
• Save trips to the shops and money.
• Can be done cheaply especially if people share plants, and knowledge.

​ Getting started
Spring is the time for renewal and new life – a perfect time for a new garden.
Keep it simple and start small, consider how much you will be able to water in summer and the amount of money you want to spend. You will need a sunny, sheltered space and it is easier with friable, fertile soil but not essential because you can add compost and nutrients to build up soil life.
What you decide to plant depends on personal preferences and your own situation but here are some suggestions for beginners.
All these can be grown in suitably sized pots. (Buy good quality organic potting mix).

• Summer salad vegetables of your choice.
• Perennials or long - lived plants are less work e.g. many herbs – Rosemary, thyme, oregano, parsley
• Silver beet will keep producing for a year (allow 2- 3 plants per person depending on growing conditions).
• A lemon tree.
• A large tomato variety planted with a climbing frame against a north facing wall and kept well-watered and fed will produce abundantly.
• Edible flowers for colour and bee and insect life.

 
In a northland veganic garden Springtime means:
Start seeds inside or in a cloche or polytunnel etc in September. Or you can buy your baby plants instead. I suggest you wait until at least early October to plant in the ground for greater success. The soil needs to have warmed up and daylight hours longer.
For an in - ground garden in our clay soils wait until the soil is workable (not puggy). Prepare your garden bed by removing weeds, digging over and forking in compost, lime and general garden fertilisers to 2 spade depths. There are plenty of You-Tube videos to guide you.
Slugs and snails are plentiful in spring and can gobble up your baby salad plants overnight once you plant them out, so here are some options for vegans.
Slugs and snails find it difficult to move across:

• Copper strips (at least 75mm wide) 
• Vaseline (petroleum jelly) smeared on the sides of pots (can be mixed with sand)
• Fresh sawdust, wood shavings and sand spread around plants can also deter them

If you are planting in the soil you may want to prepare traps (lay old untreated boards on the ground and collect the slugs from the bottom side daily. Search for snails under rims and bases of pots and on existing plants in the early morning or at night with a torch. Snails can travel 25m in 24hrs and slugs only slightly less so if you are relocating them consider this.
You may invite a thrush to your place by digging up the soil and mulching with lawn clippings etc. Slugs and snails are part of the thrush’s natural diet.
You may also want to consider sacrificial plantings and catch crop plants which can lure the pests away from your precious seedlings. I like to have a mix of flowering plants e.g. mustard, comfrey, marigolds and poppies.
Happy gardening!
Faye Slater –  not an expert, just a long term permaculture gardener and learning veganic gardener like many and I love growing our own food.