Ever since we relocated to Auckland almost 6 months ago, I’ve been keeping myself occupied by picking up little pet projects to make the best of this experience. If you follow my Instagram, you might have seen random vegetable gardening posts and thought “Whaaaat? Where did that come from?” I know, right?
In fact, when I was in Singapore, I did get swayed into the pretty dreams of growing my own herbs (imagine a white, minimalistic room with gorgeous greens, yada yada yada….) and gave into temptations, buying grow kits and whatnots. Although some seeds sprouted, I will admit that my success rate of any greens growing beyond a couple of weeks is 0%.
So when I announced my plan to grow veggies in my Auckland garden, you can imagine the skepticism support on J’s face. BUT I brought up the perfect excuse that would appeal to most of us Asians – “Wouldn’t planting our own veggies save us loads of money?” And so I got the green light to start my veggie garden.
During my first visit to the gardening store, I remember laughing at all sorts of inventions, like knee pads and fancy gloves. “Who’d need them anyway?”. After my first long gardening session.. I wished I bought them haha! Gardening is TOUGH WORK! Sometimes I feel like I’ve completed a whole gym session with weights, because my back would ache the same way from bending and pulling up weeds or planting new seedlings. respect.
Don’t even get me started on mowing the lawn with a manual push-mower…. For gym rats – imagine pushing the prowler repeatedly for an hour.
Despite all that hard work and icky moments (discovering a HUGE AS, FAT earthworm under one of my planters, along with many black beetles was a memorable moment), I can’t even describe how proud I feel during harvest.
Although I’m no garden expert – here’s some thoughts and info-sharing!
What’s going on in my garden at the moment?
Tons of spinach, lettuce, potatoes, broccolini, snap peas, strawberries, bok choy, carrots (which are freshly planted). I have 2 large troughs, 1 small trough, 1 bucket and some garden lawn space that I use too.
Seeds or Seedlings?
Having quite low confidence in sustaining green life, most of my veggies are grown from seedlings from Palmers or Kings Plant Barn (my new fave). Veggie seedlings cost $10 for 3 trays (each tray = 6 seedlings) so I do think it’s quite a good deal. The seedlings grow well and I don’t have to worry so much about the early stages.
My radishes and potatoes are grown from seeds (normal seeds for radishes and seed potatoes) – the first couple of weeks are nerve-wracking and I grew the radish seeds indoors until they were a decent size.
Easiest & hardest to grow?
For me, spinach are the easiest. They are quite hardy and grow quite fast. Bok Choy is harder, just because they are such a slug-magnet. UGH. They also don’t yield as much as spinach.. so I’m not sure if I’m going to continue planting those.
Although potatoes are quite easy to grow, I’m finding them hard to maintain at the moment – potato problems.
Worst garden enemies?
From the very start, it was slugs and caterpillars. We tried most of the natural traps we googled –
Beer traps (putting some beer in a bottle in the soil with a few small holes). Apparently yeast attracts slugs, so the ideas is that they will crawl into the holes and hopefully drown. This did not work for us – although we did find some dead slugs in there after one super-infestation rainy day. However, it didn’t solve our slug problems on the whole.
Veggie Traps (using a small tupperware and putting delicious veggies and orange rinds? as well as slug bait in there to lure them in and kill them). Conclusion? NOPE. No chance, those buggers were too damn smart.
Veggie sacrifices – putting some delicious young veg as sacrifice around the plants so that the slugs will go for them instead – still no chance.
We ended up using natural caterpillar dust (to dust the underside of the leaves) and tui’s slug bait, which greatly reduced those buggers. Still, we do find some sneaky ones especially after a rain at night. ew.
Right now, I’m battling aphids and ants on my potato plants. I’m trying out a method I found online – spraying the leaves with eco dish wash mixed with water, leaving for 5 minutes and rinsing it off with water. Keep your fingers crossed for me!
Any questions or advice, I’d love to hear them! Leave a comment 🙂 I hope to keep you guys updated with my gardening journey!
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