What can I plant beside the seaside?

Good‘s new gardening expert Zoe Carafice is ready and waiting to solve your dilemmas! Each question published on Zoe’s blog or in Good receives a fab prize from Tui Garden. This week: the best plants to grow in wind-swept, exposed areas.

Email your gardening questions to [email protected] and every question answered in Good or on Zoe’s blog will receive a fab prize from Tui Garden Products!

Q: We’ve just moved into a newly-built house on the south coast of the South Island and have a bare patch of garden in front of the house facing the sea. We’re about 50m from the shore so get a lot of salt spray and lots of wind from both the south and west – I was almost blown off my feet getting out of the car last week. I’d love to grow veggies as well as pretties but don’t know where to start. We’ve had some terracing put in and had that planted that out with natives and covered the area in bark.
–Donna

A: There is nothing prettier than a coastal veggie garden and you can have huge success even in the most extreme locations!

Firstly you will need to create a good buffer to break the full force of that cold wind and salt spray. Natives sound perfect; a strip of tall flax (Phormium tenax) would also do the trick. While you are waiting for this buffer to grow, you could rig up a low (1m) fence made from wind cloth to shelter your garden.

I imagine you have very sandy soil which won’t hold many nutrients and will be dry in summer. Build up a raised veggie bed using sleepers or found materials like driftwood from the beach and fill this with rich compost. You have an excellent source of free fertiliser for your garden – seaweed can be collected and made into liquid fertiliser (by soaking in a bucket of fresh water) or added to your compost bin to rot down before applying it to the soil.

You will be surprised by what plants grow but be prepared to experiment with your vegetable garden. Beetroot, silverbeet and spinach are said to grow happily in salty conditions but give all your usual favourites a go and see what works.

You can surround your veggie beds with coastally hardy herbs such as thyme, rosemary and mint as well as flowering plants like nasturtiums and geraniums for colour. You will win some and lose some but eventually you will find the perfect balance and enjoy a thriving seaside garden!

–Zoe Carafice

Donna has won a bottle of Seasol from Tui Garden Products! Seasol is a seaweed-based plant tonic that has been used by Australian and New Zealand commercial growers and home gardeners for over 30 years.

The naturally occurring growth stimulants in Seasol promote strong root growth, reduce transplant shock, improve germination rates and increase flowering and fruiting capacity.