Seventy-nine-year-old Kingscliff resident Anne Law said she cried for days after her beloved vegie garden which helped feed her and her partner was ripped out by her landlord recently.
Anne and her partner Brian Smart, who live at the Drifters Holiday Village in Kingscliff, have tended the small garden plot on park land behind their relocatable home for a number of years to supplement their weekly groceries.

Anne has lived at the park for 20 years and was allowed to have the vegie patch by a previous owner for the past 14 years and it had flourished in that time.
But the current park owner, Reg Church, after seeing Brian using a hand-held hose to water the garden every now and then, warned them late last year to stop using the tap water which he said he was paying for and to use the park’s bore water instead.

‘But we can’t use the bore water, there are warning signs around here telling us not to drink the bore water so we didn’t use it for the vegie garden as we had many leafy vegetables there and it would only kill them,’ Anne said.
‘We grew silverbeet, beans, potatoes, tomatoes and passionfruit, we only waterered the garden occasionally using a hand-held hose. We grew those  vegetables to supplement our food because as pensioners we can’t afford the increasing fruit and vegetable prices.’
‘It was like a bomb hit me when the new owner pulled it out, I would burst into tears all the time after that,’ she said.
Brian, 79, who photographed the owner ripping the garden out, said it was a heartless action and unnecessary.
‘The previous owner let us use the space after he cut a small tree out from there and there was no problem using a little bit of the park water with a hand-held hose as sprinklers are not allowed, but the new owner didn’t like us using tap water,’ he said.

‘He told us he was paying the water bill but that water is for general use and part and parcel of our rent.
‘When he finished pulling the garden out, he stuck every­thing into plastic garbage bags and did not even offer us our vegetables back, just threw them out.’ he said.
Park owner Reg Church refused to return repeated calls from The Echo seeking his  commaent.