50 YEARS OF FERTILE GROUND

For Dave Woods an interest in gardening started as something of a teenage fixation with sweet corn.

“I enjoyed it so much I started growing my own,” he remembers. “That’s when I realised I liked growing things.” He became even more interested after a stint on his uncle’s farm. “If my situation had been different I might have become a farmer,” reflects the retired mechanical engineer.

His wife Gillian, a retired lab technician and library assistant, says her father was a keen gardener when she was young. “You had to have a vegetable garden in those days to survive – there were no supermarkets.”

All about the soil

Shortly after getting married in 1970, the couple bought their first house in Auckland’s Royal Oak. Dave headed straight for the back yard and started turning