Crisis gardening: The Australians creating sustainable veggie gardens during COVID-19

When COVID-19 set off a wave of panic buying, Hannah Moloney was one person who didn’t run to stock up at the shops.

Moloney knew her small urban farm, three kilometres from Hobart, would generate enough food to last her family for months.

She and partner Anton Vikstrom have turned their 0.4-hectare block into a sustainable hub of veggie gardens and orchards.

With resident chooks, bees and milking goats, the couple (and daughter Frida Maria) share their knowledge and skills teaching permaculture design through their business, Good Life Permaculture.

But when anxiety around coronavirus reached fever pitch, Moloney was inundated with requests from people wanting to start their own backyard food supply – and fast.

“We were getting a lot of people contacting us in a panic, actually in deep fear,” Moloney says. “They were scared, and wanted to reclaim some sense of control over their world and provide some of their own food to regain a sense of security.”

Moloney and Vikstrom responded, filming a bunch of YouTube videos on crisis gardening, giving the basics on how to plant edibles no matter where you live, whether it’s kitchen bench sprouts, a balcony of salad vegetables or a garden bed of seedlings.

People in small spaces should take heart. As Moloney says in the video, “Everyone can grow food – this is about finding the right method that suits you and your home.”

Later episodes teach viewers how to plant a winter food garden, and how to compost for your home. The YouTube series will continue,  Moloney says, “as long as people need it to go”.

She hopes the current surge of interest in the art of growing food will be a turning point for communities to become more sufficient and resilient than they have been.

“Even if that change is simply growing some of your own food on a balcony garden, that is living a more connected, resilient life – deeply and meaningfully,” she says. “We can do this.”

Someone else who’s out there doing it is Sue Wetherall. The Adelaide resident is using the hours she’d normally spend commuting to turn her entire front lawn area into a vast edible garden.

The potatoes are already in, and Wetherall is now adding all sorts of vegetables to replace the lawn right across her suburban front yard.

“I’ve planted 110 bulbs of garlic today,” she says. “My fingernails are dirty.”

While Wetherall isn’t a complete newbie to sustainable gardening — she already grows some food and has free-ranging chooks and a beehive — she calls her current process “gardening by Google”, getting the gardening information she needs online and in old gardening books, “and I just make it up as I go along really”.

Wetherall chose a no-dig method to create the garden bed, layering cardboard on the established grass then heaping that with cow manure, straw and compost, which will kill the grass and create “hopefully a really nice gardening medium instead of a water-thieving, ugly front lawn”.

The inspiration for Wetherall’s project came from Hobart’s MONA museum, which is running a competition on creating personal “victory gardens” like those planted during wartime.

If COVID-19 has brought any benefits for gardeners, surely it’s that rarest of things – the extra time needed to bring some garden aspirations to life.

“This is what I would’ve done in another life,” Wetherall says, “but [COVID-19] has just given me the opportunity to see it through, because I can do it now that I’m at home.”

Moloney has some encouragement for would-be gardeners worried about maintaining their growing veggies once the crisis is over. In her experience, choosing not to grow your own is actually more time-consuming.

“A few years ago we actually took one season off growing … It was the most inconvenient summer of our lives. We didn’t realise how organised you have to be to do shopping trips efficiently and also how often you need to go food shopping. We find it infinitely easier to grow a huge veggie patch and simply harvest as we need produce.”