For more information go to Get Kids Growing with Organic Seeds

If you would like an organic vegetable garden but don’t have the time or the knowledge to build and maintain one all by yourself then Home Harvest can help you.

All of their raised vegetable gardens are made from macrocarpa and filled with organic compost and seedlings. Your new garden means that you will have an endless supply of fresh, chemical-free, organic vegetables that you have grown yourself.

Home Harvest can produce an organic garden to meet your needs, making it completely accessible for anyone, anywhere in the greater Wellington region.

You can make compost in a black plastic bin, available from hardware stores or garden centres.  These take up very little room but don’t allow air to circulate very well.

If you have room, make a frame out of wood, old bricks or old corrugated iron.  The bin should be no more than 1 metre square.

It’s helpful to have 2 bins so that you can have one bin being filled with fresh organic material and one bin ready to use.  If you have room for a 3^rd bin then you can have one to fill, one to leave to fully decompose and one ready to use.

Heat forms in the organic waste material so that is decomposes and after a few weeks it becomes a dark crumbly soil-like consistency.  The hotter it gets the faster it decomposes and the sooner you get your rich compost.

You need to add organic waste in layers not more than 30cm thick. This enables air to circulate through the different layers and you don’t get clumps of organic material eg lawn clippings that get soggy and don’t break down easily.

Starting at the bottom, make your compost heap using the following:

• Twiggy material such as small thin tree branches, dead flower stems

• Dead leaves and flowers

• Lawn clippings

• Kitchen food scraps

• Repeat with more lawn clippings dead leaves and food scraps

When your compost is ready to use, spread it on your garden as thickly as you need it.  Your plants will love it.

What not to put into your compost

• Meat or cheese as these tend to attract mice and rats
• Weeds with seed heads – home composting tends not to build up enough heat to kill the seeds and the weeds will grow through the compost
• Thick stalks from tree branches – these need to be crunched up in a garden shredder

• Corn cobs, whole stalks and roots from the vegetable garden –cut these into smaller pieces and then add them to the compost bin.

• Rose prunings and dead leaves from rose bushes – if rust or other fungal diseases are present they will be spread through the compost and then through your garden.

• Oxalis, convolvulus, cooch, kikiyu grass and other weeds that spread along underground or form bulbs that are difficult to remove from your garden.

What to do with organic material that can’t be composted at home

If you have an organic recycling collection in your area, then put your weeds and rose prunings etc in there.  The commercial composting ventures build huge piles that get a steam up as they build up great heat that will kill most weed seeds.

If you don’t have any way of getting your weeds to a recycling depot or commercial composting operation, then probably the only thing you can do is put the weeds out with the rubbish collection or bury them deep in an unobtrusive place on your property.  They will eventually decompose in either of these situations.

You can create a no-dig garden by building up layers of organic material till you have a pile that is high and wide enough to grow some vegetables.

You can build your raised no-dig garden beds within a frame that will keep the soil in place.

You can make the frame out of solid pieces of wood, old wooden railway sleepers, kitset beds or sheets of corrugated iron.  You can use anything that will be strong enough to stand up to being filled with soil and plants.

Or you can simply build up layers of organic material on any surface and sweep or rake the soil back into place when it starts to spread.

Or you can fill old car tyres, buckets or plant troughs with organic material to create a number of mini no-dig gardens.

The best organic material to start a no-dig garden is

• straw or pea straw,

• compost (bought or home-made),

• some animal manure (sheep pellets, chicken manure or other animal manure that is readily available)

• lots of wet newspapers, flattened cardboard cartons or an old piece of wool carpet.

Before you put your raised bed in place, cover the ground with some sort of covering that will stop weeds getting through into your garden.  A piece of old carpet is great. Or flattened cardboard cartons, a very thick layer of newspapers or you can buy commercial weed mat from hardware stores of garden centres.

This base layer is especially important if you are creating your no-dig garden over an existing lawn or a ‘wilderness’ area in your back yard.

If you are using buckets or plant pots you will need to create a bottom layer that lets the water drain through – such as, stones, large pebbles or pieces from old broken clay pots

Once you have your bottom layer sorted you build up layers of the various organic material until you have filled your container, frame or have enough height in your pile of organic material.

Leave it to settle for a week before you start planting.

Lettuces getting started in an old car tyre.