How to spend $4000 on a vege garden

LAWRENCE SMITH/Sunday News

PRETTY PLANTERS: Nicky Speedy's macrocarpa planter boxes sit on a landscaped bed of white shells.

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There is the Good Life starring Tom and Barbara, and then there is the good life.

An Auckland woman living in a luxury apartment has paid $4000 for what is possibly the country's most expensive vege plot.

Nicky Speedy, 54, wanted to join the grow-your-own craze, but didn't fancy building a garden.

So for the cost of a decent used car or a Pacific holiday, Speedy hired boutique company Patch from Scratch to make her a garden, in her ground-level courtyard, that requires not much more work than plucking a few salad leaves for dinner.

A back-of-an-envelope calculation by the Sunday Star-Times suggests that the first year's crop of cherry and Roma tomatoes, Lebanese cucumbers, snow peas, chives, and a dozen more veges and herbs, packed into about four square metres of growing space, might produce food that would cost around $300 from a store.

While the backyard plot is a long-standing Kiwi tradition, it's generally seen as a cost-saving measure, but gardening has grown increasingly trendy in recent years, leading to a niche market of gardening gurus who take the back-breaking work away from the cash-rich.

Rather than knocking up a square box with secondhand wood from someone's inorganic collection, and throwing in a few bags of compost, these companies offer planter boxes made from chemical- free new wood, containing the finest organic manure and pea straw.

Patch from Scratch's gardening packages - which include planter boxes, seedlings, sprays and fertilisers, advice, plus landscaping if required - start at $1300 and go as high as you like.

Metro Gardens offers a similar service with the cheapest planter boxes starting at $300-$400.

And Plantet Earth does a full section makeover for $10,000 to $15,000, which includes a redesign, the plants, and putting them in the ground - or $20,000-$30,000 for a spanking new courtyard including "hard landscaping" such as pergolas and paving.

The companies are based in Auckland, but service some other parts of the North Island.

Speedy's macrocarpa planter boxes sit on a landscaped bed of white shells, designed to look pretty and keep the slugs and snails away. An automatic sprinkler system spritzes her veges in four different ways depending on their needs.

The company also threw in a free worm farm and 1000 earthworms - not that Speedy felt short- changed. "I thought it was expensive, but I wanted it anyway. It has brought me pleasure."

So is Speedy, an interior design student, the envy of her Takapuna friends?

"No, they think I've gone funny," she says. "I've paid dearly for it. When I tell people, they go 'What?' They're probably the most expensive organic veges you can eat."

Now she wants chooks, but has heard they make a mess. Business idea, anyone?

- © Fairfax NZ News