Just how much food can you grow in your back yard – and will it save you money?

Between the cost of living hikes and the supermarket duopoly looking safe for now, you might be having second thoughts about trying to grow some food of your own.

You might even have gone so far as to visit a hardware or garden store, price up a ready-made raised bed (around $129), a bag of compost ($13.99), fertilizer ($13.99), mulch ($38), and vege seedlings (18 plants for $15), before realizing that that’s a big outlay for something you’ve never tried before and don’t really know much about.

Setting up a backyard vege garden takes time and money, so that old “just grow your own” chestnut isn’t always the easy option folks would like to think it is.

But what if I told you there was a way to put your outdoor space to work for you, that was relatively cheap – even free – to set up, sustainable, simple, and which (with a little time and patience) might mean 80c for a bunch of silverbeet, compared to $4.50 at the supermarket? And what if I told you, you wouldn’t have to say a single thing?

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* Can a weekend in the garden deliver summer’s worth of fresh food?

“It used to be called square foot gardening,” says Tania Austin, head gardener with the Lower Hutt-based Common Unity Project. “We call it polycropping. It’s where you’ve got a small space, and you grow a variety of species – so you might have about 10 different plant species in the one area, all really close, so it reduces the need for mulch.”

Austin and Common Unity have installed these easy-care gardens in schools, state housing projects and Rimutaka prison. The result is a network of gardens producing large enough quantities of food to feed those tending them, as well as helping to supply Common Unity’s low cost grocery and free school lunch projects.

Using the principles of permaculture – where the natural cycles of the land are encouraged, making gardens more sustainable, and therefore more productive – this method builds up the land, rather than digging into it, with layers of nutrient-dense compost, mulch and garden waste.

It’s a slower process than buying a garden from the hardware store and planting seedlings straight away. If you start now, your soil won’t be ready to plant for a few months.

But it’s much, much cheaper – because you’re using what you have.

Start with a light-blocking layer of cardboard boxes, old newspapers, even Hessian sacks, to kill the weeds or lawn below.

Then layer on grass clippings (ask the council if they give away or sell the municipal clippings), mulched prunings from your own garden, crushed-up eggshells, coffee grounds (ask your local cafe for a couple of bags), vege food scraps, horse poo, untreated saw dust – anything organic you have access to. It all goes into a “lasagne” which rots into nutrient-dense soil, ready to plant into once spring comes round.

“We use bedding from pet rabbit hutches, for example, all covered and in rabbit wee and poo, that can go on as top layer,” says Austin.

She also harvests seaweed for added nutrients, from the beach – “But only take the smaller stuff, not the big kelp.”

The idea is to create a planting area that will encourage food to thrive, with minimal interference from you.

“If you take care of your soil structure and build your soil fertility, which is what we’re really trying to do with no-dig or minimal interference, you can grow more vegetables in the same space,” says organic farmer Yotam Kay, who with his wife Niva, uses this method on their market garden, Pakaraka Permaculture in the Kauaeranga Valley, Coromandel.

Kay cites research by US organic outfit Ecology Action that shows it’s possible to grow 600 per cent more plants per square meter with no-dig gardening than with conventional gardening. Think an average of 6 plants per no-dig square meter, for every one in a traditional garden.

“If the soil is biologically active and has all the nutrients plants need, then they will grow faster, and be more productive, and generally healthier,” says Kay.

Pests and bugs will still come, “but the plant can cope with it,” says Niva Kay, who together with her husband wrote The Abundant Gardena guide to no-dig home gardens for newbies.

To keep costs down, Kay advises growing from seed, and starting with fresh greens, such as lettuce, spinach, silverbeet and mustard greens. “Greens are really easy to grow. You sow them once, harvest from them multiple times, and you can really plant your garden densely.”

Sow every fortnight or so, whenever space becomes available, and “you’re going to get so much value from your garden”.

New Plymouth urban farmer and Farm Next Door founder Carl Freeman, whose mini market garden boasts 25 types of fruit and vegetables in 50 vegetable beds, also advises new growers to get a soil test. Soilsafe Aotearoa, at Auckland University, will test four samples from around your home for free, to make sure there’s no lead or arsenic lurking under the earth.

Once that’s done, “there are lots of great seedlings you can put in. I think perpetual spinach would be my favorite vegetable to recommend, it just keeps giving and giving,” says Freeman.

Then add “perennial herbs that you never buy at the supermarket because they’re too expensive.” Mediterranean herbs, such as thyme and rosemary, are perfect for pots because they don’t need much water.

“[Urban gardening] is like lots of things in life, the more you put in, the more you get out,” adds Freeman. “It can be a bit disheartening when you’re first in a plant something straight into the ground, without any compost or much TLC, and it doesn’t thrive. But you learn pretty quickly.”

The no-dig garden basics

• Choose a spot in full sun.
• Get your soil tested
• Start now, in autumn, so the bed can get settled over winter.
• Suppress weeds with a layer of cardboard or old newspapers.
• Use the lasagne method – layers of green waste, mature compost, green kitchen scraps, eggshells, coffee grounds, leaves, seaweed.
• In spring, aerate the soil with a garden fork, before planting a mixture of the things you want to eat.