As you enter Lanie Campbell’s inner-city Sydney home, you can’t help but admire the flourishing garden in her front yard. At first glance, you may simply notice the pretty daisies and colourful nasturtiums, but a closer inspection reveals that this garden offers far more than just good looks.
It is, in fact, the Campbell family’s personal grocery store, with nearly everything that grows here ending up on their dinner plates. From the robust rosemary hedge that stretches the length of the fence, to the cluster of six perfectly formed lettuce heads ready to be plucked, tossed and dressed. Then there’s the purple cabbage that has sprouted proudly in the centre of the garden, surrounded by broccoli, parsnips, sage, oregano, parsley and mint, a Valencia orange tree, mandarin tree, lemon, kaffir lime and grapefruit trees, as well as creeping tomato vines and bean shoots ready to be staked. And that’s just the front yard. Inside the house a dark storage cupboard is even growing food, with a mushroom kit bearing its second harvest, while the backyard is a veritable food forest, with brick paving reclaimed for persimmon, macadamia and fig trees, and raised beds cultivating beetroot, corn, garlic, lemongrass, silverbeet, capsicum, cucumber, eggplant, passionfruit, celery, asparagus and Brussels sprouts, to name a few.
“There are two rules in my garden,” says Lanie. “You have to be edible or useful.” The daisies, for example, are one of the few plants that aren’t edible, but were added because they attract hover flies. “They’re good insects,” says Lanie. “They love anything daisy-like, and hover flies eat aphids.” This is also why Lanie lets some of the produce go to seed. She calls these her “sacrifice plants”, which mean they attract the unwanted bugs thanks to the flowers that form, so other plants are left alone. It’s one of the reasons she doesn’t need to use pesticides. Then there is her bamboo forest, which she uses to create the garden stakes, and her pond, which not only grows water chestnuts but has also become a habitat for native frogs.
THE PERFECT LOCATION
Lanie has created gardens in all her homes, but says over the years her passion has turned towards edibles. “I do have really warm childhood memories of eating peas straight out of the pod in my grandfather’s vegetable garden and picking mangos from his tree,” she says, “but I think I’m really interested in growing edibles because I’m really into food. I just love cooking my own fresh produce.”
Lanie’s desire to create an edible garden even dictated the house she bought with her husband, Miles. “I said we need a house on a north-facing hill with a north-easterly backyard, with no buildings or trees overshadowing the property. It made it hilariously difficult to find a house,” she laughs. “When we found this place I went, I get four to seven hours [of sun] front and back, which is what you need for edible gardening. Miles was very patient. I think he realised it was important. He’s not really into the garden, and that’s fine. It’s my passion.”
It was the desire for a career change from speech pathology that cemented Lanie’s passion. “I was into gardening and thought about horticulture, but decided to keep it as a hobby. I realised if you’re a horticulturist you would spend more of your time with people wanting a low-maintenance backyard and that would be soul-destroying for me!”
It is almost impossible to believe it was only three years ago that Lanie faced the enormous task of transforming just such a low-maintenance garden – all grassy lawn and paving, not to mention lead-contaminated soil (due to the suburb’s industrial past) – into her edible oasis. For the first year Lanie just watched and planned – learning where in the garden received full sun all day, as well as charting the difference in summer and winter. To tackle the lead issue, she worked hard to build up the soil. “There was already grass here, so I smothered the grass and built it up with truckloads of cow manure and mushroom compost. I added sugarcane mulch and left it bare for a long time for the worms to get into it and break down the soil.” Lanie’s fertile soil is one of her proudest achievements and is now largely created with castings from her worm farm and nutrient-rich matter from her compost.
Lanie admits she is not a purist when it comes to her gardening methods but her main philosophy is permaculture, an approach that involves the design of agriculturally productive ecosystems, which have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. “I loved the global principles of it,” says Lanie. “The underlying philosophy is care of the earth, care of the people and fair share.” Permaculture is well-suited for a small urban garden as it encourages you to use your land intensively. Lanie follows this approach by stacking her plantings, to mimic the growth in a natural forest, growing produce such as rocket in the topsoil above deeper rooting vegetables such as parsnips. She also tries to ensure each planting has multiple purposes. “So in my pond, I grow water celery which stops green algae forming. It’s also a great home for the tadpoles when they’re breeding, and it oxygenates the water,” she says.
Lanie stresses that the garden is not as high maintenance as people think. “I am very busy,” laughs Lanie, who is not only raising two young boys, Finn, 7, and Henry, 4, but is also completing a PhD in medical education as well as training regularly in ocean swimming. “It varies. It can be low maintenance but spring comes along and there’s a lot of planting to do. Now it’s set up though, I wouldn’t spend more than a few hours a week in the garden,” she adds.
Being self-confessed travel junkies, the Campbells also installed a straightforward drip line set to a timer to water the garden while they are away. “We also tell friends and neighbours to come around and harvest stuff, otherwise it’s a waste,” adds Lanie.
COOKING THE HARVEST
“I’ve fallen into the trap of going, ‘I’ll grow anything edible’,” says Lanie, “but then I’ll think, ‘but how much kohlrabi am I actually going to eat?’ So I’m trying to think about what we use.” At the same time, Lanie does enjoy growing unusual produce that isn’t readily available such as purple bush beans, grumachama (tree cherry), babaco (a type
of pawpaw) and black Russian tomatoes.
She has also created specialty areas like her ‘tea patch’ of chamomile and mint and a Vietnamese corner of Vietnamese mint, basil and lemongrass, which she added after a holiday visiting family there. “I like having all the things I need for Asian cooking in one place,” she says.
Despite being a small area, the garden grows almost enough to sustain the family. “We buy some fruit, but in summer I only buy vegetables if I want to use something in a recipe that I don’t grow. But in terms of everyday eating, it supplies basically all of our fresh produce.” Seeing what it takes to grow edibles has also given the family a renewed appreciation for food. “Cauliflowers take so long to grow and are so intensive in terms of keeping pests and diseases away that when we harvested a few recently we thought, these need to be savoured and used properly. They were quite precious!”
Deciding what to cook is also easier. While at ocean swimming training, for example, Lanie will think of the fresh fish in the freezer from her fish market run and look to her garden for inspiration. “I’ll think, ‘there’s beetroot ready to harvest, and beans as well’, so I’ll think up a beautiful beetroot and bean salad to have with the fish.”
Growing produce may be an exercise in patience, but for Lanie, who admits she gets bored easily, the garden has been her salvation. On some days, it offers her zen-like calm, yet also provides constant entertainment. “I think gardening like this is good for someone who needs stimulation because it changes so much,” she says. “People often say that when they return from holidays they think, ‘Isn’t it nice to get home?’ I’ve never felt like that because I could happily travel all the time. My garden is the only thing that has changed that. It’s the one thing I think, ‘Oh it’ll be nice to get back and see how it has all changed.’ Because it changes hugely all the time. In another six months it will be a totally different garden.”
Read Lanie’s blog about her journey at edibleurbangarden.blogspot.com
