When we owned our first house, I had a large vegetable garden. Very large. I had visions of growing enough veges to feed our family. No longer would we be reliant on the supermarket! No longer would we eat vegetables that had been sprayed!

In reality, we grew potatoes and not much else. With a husband at work full time, a toddler and a newborn, there was no time to create the vege garden with beautiful rich, dark soil that I had craved. We ended up turning two thirds of into lawn and even that didn't grow spectacularly well.

When we bought our next house, the backyard was much smaller. I wanted to stay away from a huge vege garden, and so my husband designed and built two raised beds. Ironically, I now find that they are too small, and over summer I think we'll put in some more beds, perhaps like this:

That would mean taking out some of the lawn that has been so painstakingly laid. We wanted a biggish patch of lawn for the children to run around on, but with kindergarten and school looming for all three, as well as living in a city that is well provided for in terms of parks, beaches and school playgrounds, having so much lawn doesn't seem that important anymore.

In my two tiny raised beds at the moment we have lots of cauliflower and broccoli:

Lots of silverbeet:

And some teeny tiny beetroot seedlings that have been languishing since mid autumn.

Even though growth slows down dramatically in a cold Dunedin winter, I delight in the fact that there aren't any white butterflies to decimate my brassicas and leave their caterpillars in what looks like a lovely head of broccoli. Being more than a little squeamish, I'm not about to pick them off and feed them to the birds. I try not to use sprays on our food crops, and I'm too disorganised to get out there with the derris dust after every rainfall.

Plan for Spring planting? Peas (all the kids love eating them straight from the plant), radishes, beans, leeks, carrots, lettuces and anything else I can squeeze in. The children have their own little garden- at the moment they have some pea seedlings, a couple of strawberry plants and a lot of weeds.

I don't want any vegetables, thank you. I paid for the cow to eat them for me.
Doug Coupland

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