A long path to the perfect garden

TV3 presenter Samantha Hayes sits by her garden balcony vegetable garden. Photo / Babiche Martens

It was a case of third time lucky for journalist Samantha Hayes, presenter of TV3's Nightline, when she tried to grow vegetables at her Eden Terrace villa.

Thanks to mosquito attacks, uncontrollable broccoli and parsley plants, mutant carrots and a fear of stray caterpillars, the odds were stacked against her ever achieving the veggie patch of her dreams. But her perseverance paid off - and two years later she's the proud owner of a lush and productive plot.

"It's absolutely amazing. We've got about five different types of lettuces so they are cranking away; they're so crunchy and fresh and beautiful. We just snip a few leaves off the sides, give them a very good wash and make a salad," says Hayes.

"And for the first time I understand what people say when they tell you that eating your own vegetables is incredible, that they taste way better than the ones you buy at the supermarket."

The 25-year-old vegetarian was first inspired to create a vegetable patch in December 2007 when it seemed that everyone was lauding the benefits of growing your own.

So down to the big backyard she trudged to sow rows of broccoli and spinach seedlings "way too close together. The broccoli was huge and disfigured and took over the whole garden".

The sheer distance of the planting from the house was another hindrance. "It's about 30 steps down there but it's hard to get down there mentally."

But it was the pernicious mosquitoes that proved the final straw for this fledgling market gardener.

"Because I was quite dedicated to start with I'd go to the extreme of spraying myself with that Deet spray to stop the mosquitoes and I would take a mosquito coil down there to burn so that those little buggers wouldn't bite me. And they still would. So I abandoned it because of the welts that I got. We just sort of let it go," she says.

"We knew that we'd wasted quite a bit of money on it and that initial time and energy but it just didn't seem like it was going to happen. It was disappointing because we'd really hoped. And everyone makes gardening sound easy. I think it's fair to say I did try."

Twelve months later Hayes and her partner, playwright and actor Arthur Meek, 28, were game to have another go at growing vegetables. Learning from their earlier mistakes, last summer they cannily decided to relocate the enterprise to the deck just outside their kitchen door, simultaneously solving both the problem of distance and of the pesky mosquitoes.

A small wooden planter box was filled with horse manure, hay and gardening mix then carrots, lettuces, herbs and onions were planted.

"We thought we'd keep it simple and what happened was an Italian parsley bush took it over," says Hayes, who now has a sure-fire plan to handle such vigorous growth: "We keep making tabbouleh."

But there was another, more fundamental issue; the organic produce they harvested bore little resemblance to the supermarket variety.

"Very strange looking carrots" and "onions that never really fulfilled their potential" were anathema to a self-confessed perfectionist.

"And this is my problem. Because I've grown up buying and eating these incredibly beautiful looking fruit and vegetables, I won't eat anything unless it's completely perfect so when we were pulling out these gnarled and twisted carrots with all sorts of different knobbly bits I wasn't quite prepared to eat them." Before long the second vegetable garden was abandoned.

Then about two months ago a professional came to the rescue.

Steve Boyd of The Home Grocer was commissioned to install a third vegetable patch. He built a macrocarpa planter box at the other end of the picket-edged deck, put in "really good base soil" and planted it out.

Today basil, baby beets, carrots, lettuces, runner beans, sage, snow peas, spinach, thyme and tomatoes are flourishing. Hayes' only concern now is a minor one: "I get worried that there're things like caterpillars in the lettuces."

With the wisdom of three gardens in as many years behind her, she sees the oral tradition of shared knowledge and skill transmission as vital for would-be gardeners.

"Steve would come over and we'd have cups of tea and talk about what he's doing," says Hayes, who attributes her own lack of expertise to a childhood in which gardening did not figure.

"I don't have a green thumb because my mother and father are not gardeners so I've never really learnt how to garden. I think the really important thing is to talk to people about how to grow them because there are people out there who have a wealth of knowledge and you just need to tap into that," she says.

"When you look around you realise that there are heaps of people - even sitting next to you at work or across the room - who are avid gardeners when they're at home and they have a lot of knowledge. I've eavesdropped on a few gardening conversations around work."