Backyard veggie patches are enjoying a bit of a renaissance, and one green-thumbed family from Auckland's North Shore is leading the charge.
The Atkinson's love of gardening and generosity of spirit have seen their labour of love in the backyard spread to the whole community.
Their secret garden in Forrest Hill is heaving with summer vegetables, flower bushes, and ripening fruit trees, diligently watched over by a brood of hens. But Veruca Salt, Aunt Spiker and Miss Trunchball are kept at a distance. The chooks cordoned off to deter any scratching of the soil while on the hunt for breakfast.
The glorious garden is a family affair. Eight-year-old Harley leading the charge with his homegrown potatoes.
"You dig a hole in the soil and plant a couple of old potatoes and you leave them for a couple of months, and you can pull them up once they're fully grown."
Four-year-old Kyla takes up the role of quality control, taste testing the strawberries and new season raspberries.
Mum Phoebe saw their backyard as a blank canvas right from the start.
"We decided as soon as we bought the place that we were going to invest in the garden.
"They say the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago and the second best time is today. So we got stuck into the landscaping and it’s just been an ongoing project since then really."
Phoebe and Dave's 'project' flourished and eventually propagated. The family built a stand from wooden pallets and positioned it on their driveway sharing seedlings with the local community.
'A rewarding process'
"We’ve got such a love of gardening and see so much value in it. Gardening has such a spirit of generosity and so we just wanted to share that with our neighbours and do our little part to create a better world in the pocket where we live."
Beans, cucumbers, tomatoes and zucchinis — just a taste of what's on offer in the Aitkinson's plot. So, full to overflowing, the family took their vision across the road and sought consent from the local council for a shared community garden.
"The extension of sharing our garden and what we do here with our neighbours was a natural step for us.
"We have a beautiful reserve across the road so we started the process with the council. It wasn't quick and it wasn't straightforward, but it’s been such a rewarding process seeing it come from a vision to fruition and seeing our neighbours get behind it."
So now, every Sunday afternoon, members of the community come together to share the workload in the garden and leave with an armful of fresh produce.
This sense of togetherness stems from the heart of the family who planted the original seed.
"I think our journey of creating this garden has been really tied up into our story of our kids coming home we had a long journey of infertility and the garden was a really therapeutic place during that time."
Eventually, Harley and Kyla came into their life through the adoption process.
"When our kids came home we started thinking about what kind of a world we wanted them to grow up in. A beautiful neighbourhood where they know their neighbours."
A neighbourhood filled with community spirit, this family has played a large part in growing.
SHARE ME