When Rina Walker started her iwi’s permaculture garden project on whānau land, a contractor had been growing maize there for 16 years. What was left behind in the ground was not the best start to a permaculture garden.
“The soil was so depleted,” she says. “It was very dusty and dry. Not many microbes in it at all, not even worms.”
Just a few years later, after a lot of hard mahi, you can dig anywhere on the block and turn up a spadeful of worms and good, rich soil, ready to create food for the whānau and wider community.
The gardens are owned by the people of Tauranga iwi Ngati Pūkenga and their block of land, Ngāpeke 7, is adjacent to their marae. In 2018, the Ngāpeke 7 Trust asked Rina Walker if she’d be interested in managing the establishment of permaculture gardening there, including creating a food forest. Walker was certified in permaculture and had lived on a lifestyle property her whole life, so she had plenty of experience and knowledge to put to work, and could see the potential of the land. She figured out a plan and in 2019 they were ready to start planting.
Gardens went in first, and then they started the food forest. The trust didn’t have a lot of money but had enough of an income from rental properties and the contract maize grower to get things started. Within two-and-a-half years, the maize contractor had left and they were able to get to work replenishing the soil after its 16 years of monocrop production.
Walker and her team carved out six swales and berms on the property to capture and store water, each about 100-140m long and about 6m wide. They planted fruit trees and natives into the berms, and then planted cover crops in between to get the fertility back into the soil. On went loads of homemade soil food – chemical sprays and pesticides were forbidden.
They have been rewarded with abundance. Today they grow salad greens, winter greens, and all manner of other kitchen garden vegetables. In the bigger gardens, the main crops are kūmara, kamokamo, and king or elephant garlic. They harvest about 450kg each season of the garlic – which is actually part of the leek family rather than true garlic – and have become known in the community for the crop.
It grows brilliantly there, Walker says, and it doesn’t get the rust, a fungal disease that other local garlic growers have been battling.
Heirloom peaches have been another hit, and Walker says they do much better than their grafted cousins.
“Every year they get stronger and better.”
Meanwhile, their wetland provides harakeke for sharing traditional knowledge of flax weaving and fibre-making, including natural dyes.
Their gardens are run entirely with mātauranga Māori, a modern term that broadly includes traditions, values, concepts, philosophies, world views and understandings derived from uniquely Māori cultural points of view.
“That’s unique compared to other permaculture projects,” Walker says.
The process includes following the maramataka Māori, which is a traditional planting or fishing monthly almanac using the moon, stars, and planets. The team has also named various landmarks on the property after the stars of Matariki [Pleiades].
“Now, we’re not trying to be trendy,” Walker says with a laugh. “We’ve been following that for years, long before the rest of the country got into it.”
Indeed she says maramataka goes hand in hand with permaculture, which she calls “the new kid on the block” in comparison to the centuries of hard-won traditional knowledge.
“We don’t know it all, we’re learning a lot as we go,” she says. “All the things that we’ve been doing guide us and the results influence our approach. The learning doesn’t stop; although all of us have been doing this for a long time, every day there is still a little surprise.
“The main thing is being kind to the environment, which is the permaculture thing as well,” she says. “Our people understood that you respect and you take care of your environment and it will give you what you need. That’s the kind of thing we were brought up with and still follow.”
That approach includes reducing or eliminating harm to the environment, which naturally prohibits the use of chemical pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. They make their own organic food for the soil and practice crop rotation, never putting the same thing in the same spot every year, to reduce potential nutrient depletion and disease load.
“We don’t use any chemicals whatsoever on the property,” Walker says. “We put all our concentration into building good, healthy soil. Once you’ve got that you can pretty much grow anything. A lot of our time, energy and thought goes into that and it’s because of the way we were brought up: Don’t do harmful things to the whenua. That’s an attraction for a lot of people because they see it as something that isn’t necessarily commonly available.”
Ngāpeke’s principles and practices have indeed proven very popular. The land has become a hub for an enthusiastic set of volunteers working the gardens, ranging from local community members and groups to national organisations such as Youth With A Mission, environment groups, and even international people and groups.
“In the beginning I knew, oh heck, we don’t have the money behind the project to be able to do it on our own, that we’d have to open it up to the community,” Walker says. “And in exchange we offer some learning to them.
“It has turned out to be a really good model. Because without all of these people coming in there’s no way me and my little team could do all the work that’s been done. We can’t do it without the community, and some of our locals are looking for a community, especially after COVID.”
She says the pandemic really drove home the importance of food security to the community – being able to feed themselves within their own borders. Walker says it is part of “the whole marae vision of having healthy people and healthy land”.
“We are a social enterprise if you want to call us anything – we’re a land-based social enterprise.”
In the future, they hope to grow more food, and are going to expand into a new co-operative model as they’ve found distribution of their food to be one of their big challenges.
“Distribution hasn’t really worked for us because we don’t have the capacity to get the food out to the community. We rely on the community to come to us,” she says. “And I’m talking about the hardest areas of the community, the ones who need it the most.”
The plan is to grow more food, start the co-op, and have members coming in to help with the gardens, with depots and other gardens across town as well.
“We want to get our produce out to the community and we think that’s probably one of the best ways to do it.”
resident horses with one of the kaimahi (staff), Ole Gaspar.
Now in her mid-60s, Walker says she experienced an extremely close sense of community growing up, and maintains that’s the way to run a garden and also ensure local food security.
“Back then everybody had a sense of knowing that you have to help one another out,” she says. “You can’t do things in isolation. Mum and Dad were growing and farming, and when there was a big task to be done the whole community would come in and they’d move around from farm to farm in order to get these big jobs done.
“They understood that you need a community to be successful, so they relied on their community a lot. And so that’s the model we’re following. It’s what we’ve learned from being brought up that way.”
The days of long rows of the monoculture maize and its dusty dry soil are long gone, she says. Now they can go anywhere on the block and grow anything.
“That has been our biggest achievement. We gave it a little bit of help, but nature did the rest.”
Kākābeak and kamokamo
One of Ngapeke’s distinctive plants of choice in the food forest is the native Kākābeak. Because it’s a legume, it fixes nitrogen, benefiting other plants and trees growing around it.
It’s endangered in the wild and so Ngapeke Permaculture is determined to plant it and share seed with others
to do the same.
Rina says snails love the leaves and can strip a tree bare, killing it in a matter of weeks.
Introducing ducks into the system will help combat snail and slug populations.
A staple crop they grow is kamokamo.
It is part of the marrow family but has less water than a regular marrow.
It’s an important food to Māori, so much so that whānau have saved seed through the ages to ensure its survival.
Pick when the skin is soft – if your fingernail can pierce the skin then they are good to be cooked. Otherwise keep for next season. Eat them sauteed, boiled, baked, steamed or mashed with salt and butter.
They are popular in a boil up with either pork, brisket, neck chops, watercress, pūhā and dough boys.
Who: Ngāpeke Permaculture
Where: Ngati Pūkenga land in Welcome Bay, Tauranga
What: Community food production, regenerating wetland, future papakāinga (Māori traditional housing).
Land: 42 acres