Honey Anderson’s gorgeous, old-fashioned garden on the Canterbury Plains holds the secret to self-sustainability
Ask Honey Anderson to explain what gardening is all about and she has a very simple answer “making soil and sticking stuff in it”.
Bowling green lawns, razor- sharp edges, prize roses and a complete absence of weeds are not top of Honey’s wish list, so she was very surprised to be judged the winner of her local garden competition.
She won it because she’s one of a new breed of gardener. She requires a garden to feed her body as well as her soul.
The property she bought in Canterbury four years ago does exactly that.
At the time Honey wasn’t necessarily looking for a sustainable garden. She wanted a large, fenced section, mainly to contain her exuberant kelpie, and this led her to a charming old house in Dunsandel, south of Christchurch.
“I knew it would be more sensible to buy a new house because I was on my own, but I didn’t,” she says.
“I prefer old houses and I’ve renovated them before, so I knew what would have to be done.”
However, she wasn’t quite so sure of the garden’s needs.
“The front garden was so overgrown I didn’t even know there were rhododendrons under the biddy-bid,” she recalls.
“Down one side there was a dead macrocarpa hedge that was a fire hazard and the back was just a tangle of gorse and weeds. And there were building materials everywhere.”
After a period of serious hacking and slashing, Honey began to enjoy the excitement of finding what was under the weeds.
However, she was less excited to discover the soil was a mixture of clay and stones that was completely unloved and simply too hard to dig.
She built raised beds in which to grow vegetables and set about improving the soil in the rest of the garden.
“I’ve always loved mulch, so I mulch everything with horse manure and pea straw. Now I have real soil and real worms,” she says.
She transformed the front garden with a restful palette of varying shades of blue and purple, which complements the style of the house and attracts bees. It has a casual and romantic look.
Behind the house, fruit and nut trees and vegetables take centre stage.
Having moved here from the far north, Honey has had to draw on knowledge from her childhood in the Hawke’s Bay and her years in Melbourne to remind her how to garden in this climate.
She also takes advantage of a local nurseryman and absorbs information “by osmosis” from garden books and magazines.
Her vegetable garden contains “the usual suspects”, including zucchini, silverbeet cucumber, carrots, fennel, garlic, all kinds of lettuces, rocket, kale, Brussels sprouts, peas, broad beans and corn.
She grows enough potatoes to keep her going almost the whole year and has great success with pumpkins, especially those that are self-seeded and just come up on their own.
The aim is to feed herself totally from the garden, and although she doesn’t manage it yet, it’s not far away.
“I hate buying vegetables,” she says.
Honey also preserves a lot of food. She learned bottling and other kitchen skills from her mother and has always maintained an interest.
Now there’s a renewed interest in preserving, Honey has run a couple of classes in bottling and jam making at the famous Dunsandel Store.
When everything in her garden has reached maturity, she will likely have one of the most productive residential gardens in the country, with over 25 fruit tree varieties and her own vegetables and eggs.
But it’s not over yet.
“I think I need a passionfruit tree ,” she says.
“It’ll be interesting to see if I can grow one here.” It will probably be more interesting if she can’t.
The complete home orchard
For those who want their own fruit, but don’t quite know where to start, this is the list of what Honey is growing in her orchard.
Plum – three varieties
Blackboy peach
Dwarf peach
Nectarine – two varieties
Apricot – two varieties
Apple – two varieties
Quince
Guava
Lemon
Kumquat
Grapes – two varieties
Boysenberry
Raspberry
Gooseberry
Tamarillo
Blueberry
Cranberry
Pear
Almonds
Hazelnuts
olives
Best tips
“Mulch like mad” is Honey’s top tip for gardeners, especially those who don’t have good soil. Her not-so-secret recipe is 60 bales of pea straw a year and as much horse poo as she can lay her hands on. It’s made her unloved clay soil soft and worm-filled. She also suggests using pine-needle mulch for strawberries – they
love it.
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