NZ's top gardener gets divine
help
http://www.stuff.co.nz/4736351a11.html
By LANE NICHOLS - The Dominion Post | Thursday, 23 October 2008
![[]](http://www.stuff.co.nz/images/767278.jpg)
KENT BLECHYNDEN/Dominion Post
DIG IT: Sister Loyola Galvin has been voted New Zealand's top
gardener.
She's been voted New Zealand's top gardener, but Sister Loyola Galvin,
86, admits to a little help - she prays for divine intervention to ensure
her plants are the best they can be.
"We're dealing with God's creations and I often ask that our
efforts be successful because we're dealing with such beautiful
things."
Though slight of build and at risk of being blown over in a stiff
northwesterly, Sister Loyola can be found seven days a week, rain or
shine, tending her vegetables behind Island Bay's Home of
Compassion.
"I love it, and anything you love grows. Children that I've loved
grew and I've done that all my life.
"So now I'm doing it with plants."
Sister Loyola, a former nurse, was named New Zealand Gardener's 2008
Gardener of the Year yesterday. She took up gardening in her early 70s,
tending the home's four-hectare grounds. At 81, she took a permaculture
course, learning the finer points of holistic and sustainable
gardening.
She then set up a community gardening scheme for city apartment dwellers
"living in the concrete jungle" who wanted to grow their own
veges. The home now has 16 plots for green-fingered townies and a waiting
list.
Sister Loyola said her home-grown lettuces outshone any
supermarket-bought variety and her broad beans and spring onions were
simply unbeatable.
The secret to a great garden was knowing good weeds from bad, never using
chemical pesticides or fertilisers, and always making your own compost -
preferably out of south coast seaweed or fresh horse manure.
Sister Loyola fought off Auckland runner-up, Margaret Jones, 87, - whose
motto is "don't panic, it's organic" - and said news of her
gardening win was a shock. "I felt like a stunned mullet. I thought
they had pressed the wrong button on the computer."
She planned to use her $5000 prizemoney to coax more old folk to get out
of their rockers and into the vege plot. "Aren't I lucky to be as
fit as I am at my age? I'm trying to encourage older people like myself
not to give up when they're 65 and say, `I've had it'."
Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
an educational
non-profit since 2000
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.org
www.sbpermaculture.org
"We are like trees,
we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to grow." -
Anonymous