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Everything Garden

Starting A Veggie Patch, Managing Fertility, Observing and Caring for Your Garden.

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Never buy soil again – make it instead!

In a localised, circular economy, we need to make better use of the materials readily available to us. How can we do this in gardening? Could we save money by making our own soil from scratch?

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Heritage Seed

Why are our heritage seeds so important? Why should we make the effort to ensure that these are the seeds we grow?

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Plant a seed

For me, planning seeding is the first step towards a successful harvest. During our downtime, we enjoy spending many hours creating a clear, simple and flexible garden plan. At the change of each season, we review this plan and dive into our seedbox, take some notes, design a planting calendar and order anything we don’t have.

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Maramataka – the lunar calendar

The maramataka reflects the sophisticated and comprehensive scientific knowledge bases and technological traditional practices of Māori timekeeping.

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Lunagraph

Whau Solar, Jenny Tomlin. Exposure 3 weeks, June 15 – July 7, 2019.

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Digging Deeper

“Disruption creates gaps, nooks, and sometimes chasms in which hope and a new way of being can be explored.”

Michael Reynolds, Stone Soup Volume Seven.

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Harvest

Did you know you can harvest one lettuce or celery plant for months? By knowing and using best practice harvesting methods, you are able to increase the amount of food (yield) that you harvest from the same plant.

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What? Where? When?

A Market Gardener’s guide on what to plant, where and when.

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Nurture

Photography and styling: Charlie McKay & Jess Murphy.

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Growing fruit and vegetables in pots at the Great Dixter

Growing up in New Zealand, Aaron Bertelsen’s first taste of gardening was with his grandfather on the West Coast beaches of Auckland.

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On growing a veggie garden (or not) with my parents during lockdown

Hannah Spyksma reflects on her relationship with growing and cooking food, and the complexities of a failed gardening project.

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An introduction to pollinators and what you can do to support them

What is a pollinator?

Pollinators are the many species that pollinate and fertilise flowering plants, including bees, flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, bats and birds. Without them, more than 70% of the world’s flowering plants would not fruit, seed or reproduce.

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Embrace Rampancy – How PermaDynamics changed my life

“If you’re holding a sapling in your hand when the Messiah arrives, first plant the sapling and then go out and greet the Messiah.”

The Overstory. Richard Powers

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The Guild Method at PermaDynamics for intergenerational food resilience

A guild is a community of plants working together in harmony over space and time. By placing plants together in a specific configuration we create an interdependent ecosystem where the needs of one plant are provided for by the existence of others.

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Cover crops

Planting a cover crop is a wonderful way to bring a new garden bed to life, or to keep living plants feeding your soil over the winter period, allowing you the time and space to plan your next season.

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Apocalypse Diaries: Maine 2016 – on growing and reaping your own

“Control is what civilizations do… If we can control the world, we can protect ourselves from the darkness it contains. We can protect ourselves from what lies under the ground, in the tombs. Who doesn’t want to be protected? But who, in the end, can ever be?”

Paul Kingsnorth

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Garden farms or farming gardens

Garden farms or farming gardens. I like this description. It’s an apt way of thinking about The Food Farm. Over the last 15 years, it has inhaled and exhaled to suit our lives: from selling at markets to feeding ourselves to feeding a larger community and back to extended whānau.

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Stone Soup 9 – Giving

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Whanaungatanga

Whanaungatanga is about whakapapa, relationships, and connection to mana tangata, the strength of our whānau and our people; to mana whenua, the strength of the natural world; and to mana atua, the strength of the spiritual realm. It is about koha (giving), and it is always guided by aroha (love).

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Beneath the soil: A reclamation of te reo and Māori food sovereignty.

Wai, kai, whenua, whare— in that order. These are the four things— according to renowned Tohunga Rereata Makiha— that sit at the centre, not only of our physical needs as humans, but at the centre of our spiritual, cultural and social needs to exist within community. Food in particular has been at the heart of ceremony and celebration in Aotearoa and across the world, for millennia. Sharing food, whether we have little or much, can be an expression of love and care— as we call it within te ao Māori, manaakitanga.

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For the Love of Soil

Nicole Masters was 10 years old when she and her family left their small farm near Whenuapai north of Auckland — including goats, pigs, cats and a horse — to move to Hong Kong where her father had landed a job with Cathay Pacific. Accustomed to clean green grass underfoot, she liked to walk around in bare feet, which locals advised her against because of the dangers of “stuff on the ground”.

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Hua Parakore: A brief history

He kai he rongoā, he rongoā he kai
Food is medicine, medicine is food

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Kernel of truth

Filed alphabetically, the lack of uniformity in packet type and size has me undone. As I rifle through them, the misshapen envelopes slip out of line revealing handwritten words as little post-it notes from friends.

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Share Abundance. Share Knowledge. Share Waste

Bridget McCarthy introduces us to three organisations that are sharing the work of closing the loop using the life cycle of food.

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A return to community cookbooks

I have been thinking a lot lately about my physical encounter with recipes. Can words and pictures adequately express something that is otherwise so sensorial and emotive? Can a perfectly composed photograph of a dish in a glossy hardback generate the same excitement as one found on the smudged cover of a book that has been passed down through generations?

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Say it with pasta

I’m not quite sure where my dad acquired his love of all things Italian. It could be because he grew up in a small town in Toronto where there was a large Italian immigrant population; or it could just be that he liked the idea of siestas, shared family meals and drinking wine with lunch every day. I’m assuming it’s the latter.

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Chinoiserie Eggs

Eggs are Nutrient
Eggs are Fertility
Eggs are Cosmopolitan
Eggs are Existential.

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Thanks Mercs

When I first met TimD at Mercury Plaza to talk about this story, Mercs was about to close to make way for the future Karangahape Station transport hub. It was countdown time – we reminisced a bit, and noticed the emptiness already.

At midday, every echelon of society and ethnicity sat huddled together cheek by jowl — office workers, local folk and school boys in uniform — canteen style, on blue plastic chairs across neat rows of tables. I wonder where the heck they’re all eating now.

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SOUP POEMS

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How to Talk About Politics Over Christmas Dinner

Some tips on what to do when faced with the opinions you’ve spent the year avoiding.

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Real Tongan

I wrote this story well over a year ago now, very slowly, over a period of months. It was hard to write for a number of reasons; guilt over knowing more about French culture than my own, being uncomfortable in sharing a personal story, and wanting to do justice to a topic so dear to my heart.