Local Focus: Growing vegetables is easy, but also hard

Starting your own garden can be a cheap and easy way to feed your family, but it's not as easy as it sounds.

Edible Landscapes Architect, Shai Brod says carbon and nitrogen are the key ingredients for making good compost and soil for growing food.

Mr Brod teaches people how to grow their own food at Raglan's eco-retreat, Solscape.

When the price of food increases, so does interest in his classes. And he insists gardening isn't hard to do.

"It doesn't have to be weeding and watering and all this long hourly work, Mr Brod says. "It's actually simple. If you get the structure right from the start, the soil takes care of itself."

The passionate gardener says he enjoys seeing the smile on his children's face when they pick produce straight from their vegetable plot.

"You know you just get so much more out of it. You learn about patience and spend time with family in the garden. All those kinds of things, the benefits are just so big," he says.

No one doubts the benefits of homegrown produce, but poverty researchers say it's often hard for low-income families to get started.

"A garden is really a long-term project. A garden takes three or four months before you can harvest crops and the crops may fail, and if people are hungry today they are not going to sit and wait for the silverbeet to grow," senior lecturer at Waikato University, Ottilie Stolte says.

Researcher Kimberly Jackson agrees that growing food is a great idea, but it's not viable for everyone.

"One of the things that we found with our participants is when you're running around day after day trying to cope, without enough to stretch out to everyone, you can become a bit risk-averse," Ms Jackson says. "So it's fine for me if my crop fails, but if I've invested money that's very precious and then have nothing to eat - then that's a disaster."

Another significant issue is having to move home regularly.

Sarah Oliver, a student at one of Mr Brod's gardening workshops, has always enjoyed growing her own produce. But when she was renting there were occasions where she had to walk away from her gardens.

"It was that insecurity of a living situation that made gardening really difficult so eventually I just stopped gardening," Ms Oliver says.

Until now. Ms Oliver has her own property so she can grow her own organic produce at home in Waituna. But for low-income families that's not always possible.

"What our research has found that it's incredibly stressful when you don't have the same range of options as a middle-class person, for instance with housing," Ms Stolte says. "Low income families are moving four or five times a year, so again to grow a garden you need housing security and stability."

One solution could be community gardens which are now popping up right across the country.

"Some of these community schemes are incredibly valuable because what they do is take some of the risks out of [gardening] and they create a social support and make it easier for people to share resources and get involved," Ms Jackson says.

But there's no denying that if those living in poverty can get some stability and plant their own garden, the rewards can be plentiful.

"It's remembering how our grandparents did it, and they lived so well and we always look up to our grandparents and I really think it's just really important to remember where we came from. And almost sort of keeping it going," Mr Brod says.

Made with funding from