Kitchen Gardens of Australia: Eighteen Productive Gardens for Inspiration and Practical Advice

Eighteen diverse kitchen gardens, from subtropical Queensland to the arid zone of central Australia, from the suburbs of Adelaide to the countryside of rural Victoria and Tasmania.

By Kate Herd
Penguin Books Australia,
28/02/2011
Hardback, 232 pages

Excerpt:

Twenty years ago my stepfather was horrified when my mother planted corn in our ‘nice’ and ‘respectable’ front garden in the Melbourne suburb of Kew. For him it was embarrassing; it smacked of urban peasantry: ‘What will the neighbours think?’ Thankfully, vegie gardens are again a more accepted part of the urban landscape. Groovy inner-city cafes boast their own potagers and there are monthly neighbourhood vegetable ‘swap-meets’ where fresh unused or excess backyard produce is swapped for the different surplus of others. The busy city family doesn’t even need to get its hands dirty to benefit from its own garden any more – you can pay companies to install and maintain your vegetable garden for you.

On the other hand there are gardening makeovers based on reciprocal volunteerism like those instigated by the organisation Permablitz, where volunteers will come over and transform your garden into a productive space in a single weekend.

Digging up the front lawn for a productive garden might still constitute an anti-social act of radical gardening in some suburbs, and should by all means be encouraged! For those without land or an appropriate space of their own, a plot in a community garden or a land-sharing arrangement of some kind can be the answer. I love that a contemporary kitchen garden might be created on some unused urban land appropriated by a guerrilla gardener somewhere in a street near me; a ‘vegieplante’ who risks a council notice or two to make a low-tech and affordable edible garden out of recycled materials like pallets or car tyres. The country or rural kitchen garden is a different matter; regional gardens being marked by their access to open space and to large quantities of resources like manure and straw and, often, by their isolation. These days, however, country and city produce gardens can be equally challenged by lack of water.

Penguin Book website here.