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Listen up, urbanites. It's the new and thrilling way to impress your dinner guests. It doesn't involve vintage wines, exotic ingredients, personal chefs or exclusive catering contracts. It does involve a little bit of eco-oneupmanship.
Yes, we're talking about growing your own veggies. After all, what could give a host or hostess greater pleasure than to serve up a dish of the tastiest vegetable fare, proudly declaring, "oh yes, I grew these myself".
Get ready for admiration and gushing compliments from around the table. Because behind those few simple words lie a variety of other worthy sentiments - these vegetables have a small carbon footprint, they haven't come many food miles, and they're from a trusted source, the product of one's own hard handiwork and therefore free from unnatural additives or sprays.
Oh, and we mustn't forget the most important implication, that the grower of these veg is a right-on, hands-on, practical and politically correct individual. And these days, you could probably add "fashionable" to that list of praise-words too.
Because all joking and dinner party competition aside, it seems that over the past few years growing your own has become a popular pastime among people who would once have preferred to buy their veggies. Vegetable gardening was something your granny did in the dirtiest, most distant corner of the garden; now it's the sort of thing you see Jamie Oliver doing on TV. You read whole magazine columns about it, and you notice various new businesses devoted to it.
Suddenly it's sexy to produce your own tomatoes and carrots.
"I'm not sure whether sexy is quite the right word," laughs Sarah Davies, the founder of Patch From Scratch, a small firm that will set up a new veggie or herb garden for you. "But it's definitely trendy. And there's a bit of kudos to it, as in when you have your friends round for lunch and you have a salad you have made from your own garden. Because it's definitely very pleasing to feed and nourish your family and friends."
Davies, who moved from from Britain to New Zealand at the end of 2003, came up with the idea for Patch From Scratch in the middle of the night.
"I used to work in PR, but I had always dabbled in gardening. Then when I had my daughter I really started thinking about what I was putting into her body, about what she was going to eat. I imagine the information had always been there but I just became a lot more aware."
Trying to figure out how to combine what she enjoyed doing with her work life, she realised she was already doing it.
"My friends were always asking me what was wrong with their tomatoes, why wasn't the broccoli growing? It's one of these things that our grandparents knew how to do, like they knew how to make scrambled eggs. It's just that it got lost somewhere."
Davies thinks the biggest difference between the gumbooted gardeners of yesteryear and today's new breed in their fluoro-coloured Crocs is in the style of gardening. It's all a lot more convenient.
"It's not hard work like it used to be. It's not all digging and hoeing.
"For instance, the beds I make are raised so you don't have to deal with bad soil. And when you're out there, you're gardening rather than just pulling up weeds.
"The beds also look nice and neat and tidy. Rather than having a muddy patch of ground, they look attractive - it's something I've noticed with Aucklanders, they want it to look like a piece of landscaping. After all, a lot of people now live in their gardens - their gardens are like another room in their house, they want to entertain out there too and they want to be proud of it."
And there's no reason why they shouldn't be, says Sue Peachey, an associate designer at the Landscape Design Company in Katikati, Bay of Plenty.
Peachey knows that vegetable gardening is hot right now because last year she and colleague Hannah Williamson won a supreme award for design excellence and a gold medal in the exhibition gardens category at the Ellerslie International Flower Show for their Incredible Edible Garden.
As the judges said: "This garden showcases edible plants in a secluded garden to create a relaxing retreat. You'll find inspiring ideas using pots, tiered planters, espaliered plants and climbing structures to show how small urban spaces can be used efficiently."
Says Peachey: "Yes, it was quite small, because we wanted to get away from the idea that you had to have a large space to grow edible plants. We also wanted it to have real aesthetic qualities."
Peachey and Williamson arranged their edible plants carefully for maximum visual impact.
"The blueberries have this glaucous silver foliage and the pepinos have this fantastic globular fruit that's purple with yellow stripes. We also had things like strawberries hanging out of a metallic container, which also looked great."
Today's veggie garden designs are changing some of the old rules, says Peachey.
"I think people have these memories of their grandparents gardening, which wasn't usually about how it looked.
"There was usually a certain area put aside for the vegetables that wasn't integrated into the rest of the outdoor living space. And I think that transformation - the assumption that the vegetable garden is not part of the formal garden - is the biggest change."
In an era when people have limited space in which to grow plants - she's talking townhouse and apartment dwellers - a garden that assimilates vegetables and other edibles into its overall look doesn't need a lot of room.
There's a lot you can do with just a courtyard, says Peachey.
David Tippett, who has been running Tippett Nurseries, in the heart of what is now one of Auckland's most fashionable districts, Grey Lynn, for 24 years, has also noticed changes in what today's customers want.
"More city dwellers seem to want to grow their own veggies, but they want it to be thoroughly modern, that is, good looking, convenient and politically correct."
"There are an increasing number of people who are making it their job to create gardens for people.
"Also more and more people are happy to buy something that we've prepared for them, like a citrus tree in a pot, a planter box with herbs or a hanging basket of strawberries.
"I think people want solutions and they're happy for us to design it or plant it and they just take it away.
"We've also noticed that people are less interested in spraying as a solution. If it can't look after itself, they're not interested in planting it.
"And more people want organic or eco-friendly solutions - sales of those products have definitely gone up."
Which brings us to what everyone we talked to for this story say are the main reasons veggie gardening has got its groove back.
It's a combination of health concerns and environmental awareness.
"More people are thinking about where their food is coming from and whether its healthy," says Davies.
"And vegetable gardening gives people so much more than the food - it's a very relaxing thing to do, it's a really nice time out."
Peachey adds: "I think people are also really conscious about climate change now. I think they have accepted they need to take some responsibility for the planet. They want to do their bit, and they've become conscious of what slow food is.
It's also about food security - consumer confidence in the food industry is low and this way you know what sprays have gone on those plants.
"Supermarkets can also be a bit of a mono-culture. If you grow your own, you can try different things.
"And, it's also really nice for the kids to go into the backyard and eat the blueberries."
Inspired?
* Start with vegetables that are easy to grow, like tomatoes or lettuces.
* Start small - even a pot or two of herbs can be easy and extremely convenient.
* Grow things you like eating or else, like one overly keen gardener, you'll be stuck with a bunch of cauliflowers you have to force yourself to eat.
* Check the soil quality before you plant anything. Add mulch or compost if necessary to get better results.
* If you are putting vegetables or edibles into your small urban garden, consider where the warm spots or micro-climates are that best suit the vegetable you want to grow before planting anything.
* If you're living in an apartment, consider container gardening or what they call vertical gardening. A vertical vegetable garden uses shelves, hanging baskets, or trellises. If you're really short of space, check out the great New Zealand invention, an ingenious, upside-down planter that hangs from the ceiling. See www.morrisdesignoffice.com, or ph (09) 422 7117.
* Call in the experts. Most companies, like Patch From Scratch (www.patchfromscratch.co.nz, ph (09) 525 7897) or Landscape Design Company (www.landscapedesign.net.nz, ph (07) 549 1355) have a sliding scale of services that start from around $100 for an initial consultation to more for a comprehensive garden design and ongoing assistance. Or ask your local garden centre to make you up something, such as a package of summer salad seeds.
Food miles for beginners: Glossary of terms
Food miles: Sounds simple but it turns out to be a lot trickier. This term refers to the distance food has travelled, from farm or garden to your plate. If your snowpeas have come from Africa - as many of our supermarket snowpeas apparently do - they've travelled a fair few food miles. And the further they have come, the worse it's supposed to be for the environment and for the consumer.
This is because underlying that idea are a bunch of other consequences, like the fuel used to transport the food, and therefore the carbon footprint it leaves, the nutritional value to you after freezing, shipping and storage, the effect on local food producers (should you be supporting the grapefruit orchard in Kerikeri rather than California?) and the overall effect on the environment of all of these factors.
But there has also been a lot of criticism of that simplistic definition of food miles (they're miles rather than kilometres because they are an American invention). New Zealand food producers, who export a lot of food, don't like the idea.
Their argument is that transport (and distance travelled) is only one component of the overall environmental effect of food production.
Consider this: some foods grow better in certain parts of the world, so less energy is required to make them grow there. For example, to grow tomatoes in Britain, lots of power is needed to keep greenhouses warm. Growing the same tomatoes in Spain's warmer climate doesn't need as much power.
Various studies, including an oft-quoted one from our own Lincoln University, show that the overall energy used to produce, say, dairy products in New Zealand, is less than would be required to produce the same thing somewhere else, such as in Britain, even when that cost of transport (on those food miles) is added in.
Personal food miles come into it, too, because as has been pointed out by Economist magazine, a mile travelled by a large truck full of groceries is not the same as a mile travelled by a sport-utility vehicle carrying a bag of salad.
Fair miles: These are a bit like food miles, except they take a little bit more of that complex argument about overall effect into account, especially in regard to politics, and Third World producers. One research institute says the sources, as well as the distance travelled, should be considered. For example, the International Institute for Environment and Development, in London, says food miles as a concept is blind to the social and economic benefits in African countries where farmers depend on selling their food products to other countries.
Slow food: This movement, now symbolised by a dinky snail motif on the outside of businesses that subscribe to the philosophy, was started more than 20 years ago by Italian gourmand Carlo Petrini, who was horrified to find a McDonald's hamburger restaurant opening near one of Rome's historic landmarks.
So, slow food was at first simply a reaction to fast food. Slow foodies advocate re-connecting with your dinner cooking it yourself with local ingredients, using local techniques and recipes, and then sitting down to savour it with friends and family. But slow food has come to mean more, symbolising such ideological battles as local industry versus international, small business versus big, organic and natural versus highly manufactured and the enjoyment of each moment and each mouthful rather than rushing through the day, and the meal.
The 100 Mile Diet: Your diet consists only of items that have been produced within a 100 mile (160km) radius of your home.
Locavore: A person who eats locally. Sometimes this means from within a radius of 160km. In New Zealand you'll find mobs of locavores at your nearest farmers' market.
Foodshed: The term is borrowed from watershed. In the United States a watershed refers to the drainage basin or catchment area for water in that area. So if you're eating only from your own foodshed, you're eating from within your catchment area. You're most likely also a locavore who subscribes to the 100 mile diet.
