A vegetable gardener’s paradise can be found tucked away on a tiny plot of land behind a historic Dunedin building.
The triangular-shaped area behind King Edward Court is the pride and joy of semi-retired landscape architect Don Barham.
"It’s a demonstration garden. That’s why I put some show into it — some flowers amongst the vegetables and some vegetables amongst the flowers."
Included in the wide variety of plants such as corn, tomatoes, beetroot and lettuce are vegetables favoured by some recently arrived immigrants Mr Barham has come to know.
"I’ve got a lot of friends who enjoy kale, so I’m growing a lot of the cabbage family and silver beet."
Next to Mr Barham’s model garden is the big brick and stone building which originally housed King Edward Technical College. Dating back to 1913, it was in part designed by his grandfather.
This summer sunflowers sown by Mr Barham were in full bloom outside the building’s front.
"The first lot I sowed, nothing grew ... but I had the rest of the packet, so I just sowed them [later] and suddenly they’d all grown."
He believed the two main tricks to a successful vegetable garden were feeding the soil and regular hoeing around the plants to keep the weeds at bay.
"I put a lot of compost and manure into the soil first and got it going."
An important task was to get rid of the perennial weeds, he said.
"So there’s been oxalis in here and convolvulus and couch grasses and so forth and now they’ve all gone."
- By Rudy Adrian
