by HEATHER-LYNN EVANSON

IMAGINE THE LUXURY of walking from the kitchen, into your garden, picking a sprig of marjoram, a head of lettuce or a bunch of thyme and adding it to your pot.

For some cooks, it might be a dream but for transplanted New Yorker Suzanne Griffith, it's a daily norm.

But the harvest was not always this bountiful for the architect at Gillespie & Steele.

In fact, when Griffith first relocated to the island and got married, she, like other consumers, bought her vegetables from the BARVEN outdoor market in Cheapside, The City.

It was an expensive outing, she recalled.

"When we first started going down there, because we didn't know what we would use each week, or what we really like, we would spend a significant amount of money there," Griffith explained.

"There were certain things we would buy there that wouldn't survive the week, like the herbs we like and the lettuces. So this [her garden] was clearly an effort to offset those things. Certain things you go down there and they wouldn't be there or up to the standards or a little bit too much, like tomatoes, so I started incorporating the tomatoes," she noted.

Thus, the idea for her own vegetable garden was born.

Her vegetables bill, which used to be $40 a week, has been reduced to less than half that amount. She now spends as little as $15. She buys cucumbers, but not as many tomatoes.

In addition, all her vegetables are grown organically; even the pesticides are organic. What she doesn't use, she exhanges, gives away or sells.

She has even learnt the hard way what pests and vermin can do to a hard day's work.

Rats fleeing a cane field decimated her tomatoes while pests destroyed her crop of cucumbers.

But Griffith is philosophical and realistic.

"When you have a garden and ou wanna cut costs, you have to force yourself to go outside and say, What am I gonna use? 'cause you're accustomed to going to the supermarket. It's a changing of the way you operate," she explained.

"That's one thing about gardening and trying to offset costs. You have to put in there what you know you like and that you're going to use or something that you really consciously want to introduce into your diet.

"If you're planting stuff that you think well you know . . . and you don't really like it, other than if you could make an exchange with a neighbour, there's not a lot that will happen," she said.

Griffith, however, considers herself lucky because she genuinely loves gardening.

Her garden started as a hobby when she was waiting for her citizenship to be finalised and had time on her hands.

But now, from her Sheraton Park, Christ Church home which she shares with her husband and three-year-old son, Griffith looks out on her six garden beds that boast almost everything a cook could want.

Tomatoes, Aubergine [egg plants], okras, squash, basil, dwarf pea plants, okras, chives, spinach, various kinds of lettuce and broccoli; and not to mention lemon grass and mint for teas.

All of these in six beds, you might ask.

Yes! And it's that secret of how her garden grows that won her the Kitchen Garden Of The Year award at this year's Agrofest.

"I did quite a bit of research," she explained. "And in particular it is unique because I built everything on top of the crab grass in raised beds.

"The other thing I practise, and I learnt quite a bit about it n the Internet, is high density planting and it really means that the plants are extremely close together so you can have a lot of different things or a lot of one thing in one small area and it saves you time and also it saves you water," Griffith added.

"But because I really like gardening, I think I spend an inordinate amount of time out there, but now I try and water it in the morning if it hasn't rained and I find that's a good judge – if it hasn't rained the night before, I take about 15 minutes and water it," she said.

In addition, she uses a bucket as opposed to a hose to avoid wasting water.