Featured GAPS* Gardener

Location/Zone: Perth, Western Australia, Zone 4 

What type of Garden:  Garden beds and some pots

Gardening Experience: My husband is the main gardener in our home. We’ve done conventional gardening here and there since we have our home in 2007. However, since we’re doing GAPS we focus more on growing edible gardens for these past few years.

What do you like to grow: Garlic, herbs (thyme, rosemary, sage, basil, dill, parsley, spring onions), tomatoes, chokos, zucchini, rhubarb, lemon grass, carrots, garden companion flowers as well as some indoor plants and succulents.

Favorite item to grow: Below-ground vegetables like garlic, an easy set-and-forget plant, always successful and we cook with it quite a bit.
Least favorite item to grow: Leafy vegetables like lettuce because snails keep eating them.
Recommended item to grow for beginners: Garlic, herbs like rosemary and thyme (great additions to our meat stocks).

_____________

"My appreciation for growing our own food only started when my family started doing GAPS. The cost of buying organic food, and understanding the journey of the plants themselves, is what lead me there. I’m very grateful for my husband who loves gardening. He takes care of our garden while I tell him what to grow and cook with the produce we have in our garden.

We are still at an early stage of establishing our edible garden and still have a long way to where we want it to be. For a long time, we were thinking of garden designs, improving the watering system, what to grow etc. But now we realised, we just have to start, plant some of the things we’d like to eat and see if it grows. These days we are embracing nature to do its own work. Letting the plants grow to seed and sow themselves so that the garden is populated with them. Appreciating weeds for what they add to the soil. As long as plants grow, we are getting the benefit of having an edible garden."