Weekend Permaculture

My formative years were spent living in Hokianga, a small harbour in Te Tai Tokerau | Northland region of New Zealand. We lived with our extended family and grew most of our own food. Poppa grew most of our vegetables on his patch, it was like our supermarket. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and I think that is where my love for growing food began.

Fast forward a decade and one of my first jobs was working in a plant nursery, another decade and I was growing food for my family and sharing the surplus with family and friends.

It was in my 30’s that I started looking deeper into how we grew food, we traditionally had very few outside ‘inputs’ which I noticed was vastly different to how most people got a garden going. It was around this time that I was introduced to the term ‘permaculture’, not vastly different to what I was used to it was helpful to have a framework for what I was doing and some way to apply self regulation and feedback. I completed a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) in the Waikato and went on to coordinate and run permaculture workshops.

Some 20 years later I would still describe my style of gardening as permaculture and am still constantly adjusting and challenging my approach to growing.

It was after a bit of a deep dive into Buddhist philosophy that I took the step from vegetarian to vegan and it was about that same time we read a book called Regenesis by George Monbiot, who referenced an organic ‘stock- free’ grower Iain Tolhurst (Tolly) in the UK and we went on a bit of a information-bender to see what growing food without captive animals (stock) was all about.

Whilst in the other hemisphere, Tolly had designed a framework that not only took out all stock, but reduced what he references as ghost acres (where something is grown or produced on another piece of land and brought to yours like perhaps getting in mulch, compost or even seeds and chook feed), this really resonated with us.

We no longer eat eggs or meat and we were bringing in food for the chickens so we sent them packing. The chicken pen was in the best spot in the gardens and it enabled us to extend our garden into this space. With some site modifications we developed terrace gardens and put in our first two year green crop to start building the soil.

This journeys starts here as we put into practice and share our learnings (success and failures) with others and adapt Tolly’s method of stock-free gardening to our subtropical environment here at Nikau Bay Camp.