How to grow your own forage garden

If you like the idea of gardening but can't bring yourself to spend hours toiling away, making a self-sowing forage garden might be the answer.

With minimum effort you can use a wild corner of your patch, relinquishing control and letting the garden do the hard work for you, gardening expert Hannah Zwartz says.

It comes down to two things - choosing the right plants that will self-seed, and giving them a good start, she told RNZ’s Saturday Mornings.

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Zwartz has over 30 years' experience gardening professionally, including looking after the herb and succulent gardens at Wellington Botanic Garden and running community market gardens in the Hutt Valley.

A bit of preparation is involved for a self-seed forage garden to thrive, she says.

“Start by looking at what's doing really well in your garden, so maybe you've got a silverbeet plant that's just massive and really healthy and happy. Maybe it's lettuce, maybe it's a beautiful parsley plant. those are the ones that are obviously liking the conditions.

“And those are the ones if self-sown, these plants will eventually take over and claim the space from the weeds.”

Start with a weed-free surface, she says.

“So that you're not fighting the weeds from the beginning, you want to just take out your worst perennial weeds, like buttercups, and then maybe put down a layer of compost or potting mix.”

Not all veggies will become weeds, and it depends how far they've been bred from their ancestral form, she says.

She’s noticed that if you let your parsley go to seed over a few generations, it changes from a super curly parsley and goes back to the flat leaf form - the ancestral and genetically stable form.

“I grew up in Wellington, where all around the streets, you can find wild flat leaf parsley, it's actually a really good, successful weed around Wellington, that's a really good one to have in your garden.

Of the brassicas, kale is a good self-seeder, she says.

“It's not necessarily going to feed your whole family, but wild kale, it can bring you so much pleasure.”

If you have puha in your garden, and you let it go to seed, you will have more and more and more, although Zwartz is not a puha fan, flat leaf parsley is her favourite.

“The main one that I love to eat is the flat leaf parsley, especially over winter, you can put it in anything, You can use it as a salad green, you can cook it.”

In terms of salads to eat raw her favourite is miners’ lettuce.

“It just comes up in the winter, and then it dies down in summer but once you got it, it will just keep coming.”

Silverbeet is another useful veggie, she says, which quickly makes itself at home in most gardens.

There is an art, however, to selecting a plant to let go to seed, she says.

“If you just save the first plant that goes off to seed, you're encouraging those traits of bolting to seed, which is not what you want.

“Save your seed from the best plant, and over the years, you will get a plant that's really well-suited to your own garden.”