The plot thickens
BY LYNDA PAPESCH
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Home and Garden
Courses in horticulture and floriculture helped a Picton couple redesign their garden into a colourful feast for both the eye and the dinner table.
After almost nine years and three redesigns, Picton couple Lynda and Richard Crawshaw now have a colourful, manageable garden.
When the couple moved into their Waikawa Rd home, the garden was an overgrown forest of mainly native trees and shrubs. It now boasts sweet-scented roses, lilies and a compact yet plentiful vegetable garden.
Married for 41 years, Lynda and Richard garden together, although Lynda is largely responsible for plant selection and placement, helped by experience gained studying for her certificate in horticulture, followed by a course in floriculture.
A keen gardener from way back, Lynda admits that Richard initially didn't know a weed from a flower. He knew about vegetable gardens, though; she jokes that he handles the digging and the carting.
The couple met while Richard was serving in the air force at RNZAF Base Woodbourne and Lynda was nursing in Blenheim. Air force postings sent them to the United States for 10 years, followed by time in Germany and Spain, then back to the US, where Richard retired in 1980. Retirement brought with it a return to Blenheim, where Richard worked for AMI for 23 years. He was working temporarily in Wellington when Lynda saw and fell in love with the Waikawa Rd property.
"I saw the place advertised, picked him up at the airport to go and see it, took one look and said yes," she reminisces.
Stage one of the garden redesign was to completely remove the existing garden and start again from scratch. As with many Picton gardens, they found a clay base, so they resorted to a layer of dolomite to help break it up, along with blood and bone and copious quantities of pea straw and compost.
Lynda swears by pea straw, saying it is the secret to the success of the garden.
"We use bales and bales; it puts all the goodness back into the soil as well as keeping the weeds down and putting nitrogen into the soil."
The spread of vineyards has meant that pea straw is less readily available in Marlborough than previously, Lynda says, although it is now available commercially in pellet form.
The flower beds are full of her favourite coral pink `Paddy Stephens' roses and a paler, peach-hued offshoot hybrid, `Hamilton Garden', with underplantings of begonias, impatiens, astibiles and rhubarb.
Apple cucumbers, dwarf fruit trees, standard fruit trees and more than 100 assorted asiatic, oriental, day and hybrid lilies fill in the gaps.
The 10-square metre vegetable garden is a testament to ingenuity, comprising 17 half mussel floats and two half wine barrels full of healthy greens, legumes, tubers and fruit trees.
Described by Lynda as a totally no-dig garden, the mussel floats are filled with a mix of pea straw, compost, blood and bone and sheep pellets and are continuously weed-free.
Always keen to try new crops, the Crawshaws are growing sweet corn for the first time this year, and are keenly awaiting the first crop. They have potatoes year round, planting eight to a float and growing six varieties.
Nearby, 10 varieties of tomatoes thrive, peas grow rampant, and fat, red strawberries hang temptingly over the side of a float. Passionfruit, apples, cape gooseberries, Chinese gooseberries, feijoas, blackberries, four types of peaches, peacharine, nectarine, plum, fig and olive trees thrive in different area of the vegetable plot and flower beds.
Lynda also does all her own preserves, pickles, chutneys and jams, and enjoys giving home-grown produce away.
"It's nice being able to go out and pick something and then give it fresh from the garden to somebody. It's such a pleasure."
Lynda finds the garden time-consuming at times but worth it, and very therapeutic, and Richard relaxes while pulling out weeds.
The final word goes to Lynda, whose advice is simple: pea straw and patience is what it takes.
- The Marlborough Express
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