Five reasons why I shall always love Dunedin

5. If you get a little sidetracked while looking at gardens, then suddenly realise you're supposed to be boarding a plane in 30 minutes, you can drive (quite quickly) right across the region to get to the airport without passing a single speed camera.

4. When you get to the airport with exactly 7 minutes to spare before the flight's scheduled departure time, the nice man at the counter will still check your luggage on even though the flight has officially closed.

3. Even when you are wearing jandals and clutching a lemon-scented geranium in one hand and a plastic bag of oyster mushroom-inoculated peastraw in the other. Yep, my weird hand luggage obsession has now officially moved into eccentric territory. I'm going to have a crack at growing my own mushrooms! Sam from the Shadow Gourmet mushroom company gave me the kit after my vege-growing speech at Nichol's on Teviot Street on Sunday morning.

2. Only in Dunedin can you swap a 12 month subscription to the world's most fabbo gardening mag with the promise of a big box of green walnuts in early December. I want to try making my own Italian nocino liqueur this summer. (The recipe is published in our new special edition, Homegrown, which will be launched at this year's Ellerslie International Flower Show and will be on sale in all good bookstores and supermarkets for $14.90 on November 19. (Did I mention it's the perfect Christmas gift idea?)

1. As for the number one reason I shall always love Dunedin? Contrary to previous reports, they still reckon I'm young in the deep south! And I'm sure the most fabbo newspaper in the deep south won't mind me reprinting reporter Mark Price's story on my self-sufficient endeavours.

UNABLE TO NOT TALK OF VEGES
Otago Daily Times, Monday 29 October
Young, photogenic, media savvy.. she could be just another of those annoying Auckland celebrities. But Lynda Hallinan is different. She has moved into a world we old men in gumboots and baggy jerseys usually have all to ourselves. Like the spring growth of the couch grass, Ms Hallinan - 30-something and single - has spread her tendrils into the vegetable garden. She is the woman who has been all over the television and in magazines talking about surviving on what she grows in the backyard of her typical suburban Auckland home. And, in the process, she has helped make growing vegetables almost "trendy".
But more than that: she seems not to care about weeds. Or lawns. Or codling moth.
Ms Hallinan was in Dunedin this weekend for the Rhododendron Festival as a guest of Nichol's Garden Centre. Nichol's brought her down because, well, Ms Hallinan is on the crest of the vege-growing wave.
Until the start of this year, she was merely the editor of New Zealand Gardener magazine. Then she made a New Year's resolution to live off what she could produce from her garden and whatever food she could buy each week for $10. "When I decided to do this, it was a bit of a gimmick. I was like, 'let's see if this is possible. But actually, it was so possible. It wasn't hard at all."
She keeps saying that. "It's not hard."
But then she recounts the weeks in winter eating nothing much except roast potatoes, and the other weeks, in summer, eating nothing much except courgettes - baked, grilled, roasted, in fritters. "I could probably go for the rest of my life without eating another courgette."
After 10 months of self-sufficiency, however, Ms Hallinan is still bursting with enthusiasm for a lifestyle that is simple and cheap. She worries she sounds like an evangelist. "If I could reach out to the non-gardening people out there, I would say it's actually really good fun. And it's not hard work at all. It probably takes me less time to garden than to go to the supermarket." Ms Hallinan spends her $10 food budget on sugar, eggs, flour, butter and milk. She makes her own cheese, pickles, jam and chutney; bottles her own fruit; makes pasta and pizza.
Her section, she says, is nothing special. The soil is "pretty lousy". She gets frosts and she is next to a motorway.
She finds the cooking harder than the growing but has found that "anything can be fixed with garlic and olive oil".
She went on a date with a man who noticed she could not go for more than two hours without talking about vegetables. "I can tell you that growing your own vegetables is very good and satisfying, but perhaps not a great way to find a husband."
Althoguh she plans to go back to a more normal regime next year, she will not give up the weedy patch she calls her garden and "the meadow" where lawn once was.
"The biggest problem with New Zealand gardens today is that we have this obsession with having good-looking, tidy, low-maintenance gardens because we think they're going to add value to our houses. But they don't add value to our lives."

Go Otago! I might even buy myself a blue and gold rugby jersey next winter...