After much deliberation, and some interesting suggestions. We have now officially named our garden sites- the Original site is now known as ‘ the secret garden’ to denote its slightly hidden location and the new site is being called ‘the orchard’ to help us visualise its future destiny. The planter boxes around the Aro Valley community center and park as known as…..’the park’…lets not make these things complicated

As spring really sets in and summer approaches, many of the plants we initially planted in the  secret garden are beginning to flower and set seed, kale, broadbeans, silverbeet, brocolli etc. So at out last working bee wew had a real puch to harvest as much as we could and remove any plants which were using space inefficiently -  We had to make room for the large new load of plant we picked recently picked up (thanks again Fiskars and Mitre 10!). The Secret garden is now home to, amongst other things: Sweet corn, more currents, chives and peas.

Some great hardy perenials also made their way into the aro valley park planter boxes – camomile, rosemary, sage and some more obscure things you can see in the photos. We had a real puch to plamt things that did not need to much water, as we have not quite clarified how our gardens will survive over the inevitable Aro Valley summer holiday exodus.

Thanks to Bark Ltd and Wellington City Council Parks and Gardens we have a great mountain of mulch turning into compost, so we also spread this liberally around the newly planted beds to help them retain moisture.  The initial mountain we had in the orchard is gradually dwindling.

We will be having one more planning meetin for 09, at which we will finalise our tree order for the orchard…gotta be in early to get the specimens we want, clarify who will be around to water the gardens and make some tentative plans for what should be an awesome year in 2010…. exciting.

Bruce from Fiskars has also been back in touch and discussions are underway about our official opening ceremony…more soon

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There were so many ideas flowing at our last planning meeting, that we could have gone on all night!

Here is the gist of what emerged:

• We will go collect our next load of plants from Mitre 10 mega on the first weekend of November (ie sat 7^th)

• We will make our potluck planning meetings a regular thing and hold them in the first week of the month , to allow us two weeks before the following working bee to gather resources etc. The night of the planning meeting will be set by whoever offers to host it that month.

• The Hare Krsna devotees from Gaura Yoga have decided to start building raised garden beds around Wellington and are keen to build links with our group

• Charles had a meeting with the chairperson of the Aro School BOT and they would like some assistance from our group with developing and maintaining their new gardens. Charles has offered to work with teachers and will ask other member s of the group if they would like to be involved further down the track.

• A new member of the group- Simon, has secured another site from Vic uni. This new site is behind the empty lot at 203 Aro st. He will lead this project (initially section clearing) but it will become one of the branches of our working bee mahi. More to come on this..

• We have had an offer to hold a grafting workshop for our group, we may investigate this in the furture.

• Vic Uni have installed a tap for us at the new site

• In addition to Arobake giving us coffee grounds and egg shells, Laffare have offered us the same and also wine bottles for building raised beds. There is also the potential of us getting fruit and vege scraps from Aro cafe and Aro Valley fruit supply, but we would need to make a roster to collect these.

• Bark Ltd- VUW’s gardening company have given us a massive pile of mulch!

• Charles Met with Bruce from Fiskars a couple of weeks ago, he was very impressed with our garden and was talking about our official opening ceremony. This may happen sometime at the beginning of December. More on this to come.

• Ping has signed us up to ‘no throw’ a resource directory. – you can find this at http://www.nothrow.co.nz

• We spent the rest of the evening working on the plan for the new site, big discussions were held about how to design the site for efficient water use and conservation. We will continue working on this next time.

The meeting was followed by a super productive working bee at which we began working on improving the soil in our new orchard site. Grant showed us how to make compost teas using forest leaf litter to help build up the microorganism soil life and we sheet mulched large areas of the grass with carpet, cardboard and tree mulch.

The recipe for the compost tea was:

In a large bucket of fresh water (leave it over night if is tap water) mix a good handful of well rotted compost and or leaf litter with some molasses (a big table spoon) and a cup cornmeal or otas. Give the buckets a big shake or stir to aerate it and leave to sit for 3-72 hrs before pouring over the soil you wish to enrich.

We planted native tree borders to both contribute to the growing ecosystem of our site and also to clearly mark where cars should no longer drive!

We planted an nice collection of companion plants in the old site (comfrey, tansey, lemon balm) to create a ‘wild garden area’ to attract beneficial bugs and insects

We collected wine bottles and coffee grounds from Laffare for future garden bed building

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Big things are happening again!

At our most recent evening potluck dinner planning session, Simon took us through an exciting participatory GIS (geographical information systems ) session in which we were able to view a large scale map of the whole of aro valley and discuss how our sites fit into their wider community context and visualise our next moves. We will continue to work with the medium as Simon further explores how to use GIS as a tool to support community garden groups.

While enjoying delicous sald greens from the kai o te aro garden, we also began to plan how to use our new site (on the Victoria university grounds). We have decided to use the bulk of this new site to plant  a fruit and nut orchard. We will also have a range of different garden beds to try out new techniques and set up some compost bins for our community to use.

At our working bee the following saturday, we got our teeth stuck into some of the bigger projects at the original site- namely getting the worm bath going and putting up the espalier wires for our apple tree and grapes.

The crops we planted a month or two ago are doing really well and many need to be harvested, all the fruit trees and shrubs are rich in buds. We have been enriching our garden recently by adding lots of coffee grounds and egg shells (kindly dropped off to the garden from a local cafe- thanks arobake!), these also help to keep those pesky snails away in a fully organic way.

We then headed down to the new site to further develop our plan. We began to prepare the site for its future orchard status (the tree won’t go in until autumn next year) by planting some orchard companion plants (namely borage and comfrey)

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There are many exciting things happening in the Kai o te Aro group:

- Our community center coordinator, Vorry has confirmed that we can use the Te Aro hall as a base for our monthly meetings, allowing us the have a little more structure in our process and a have a real home. We have also moved all out lovely Fiskars tools into a storage bunker behind the hall, which is secured with a combination padlock meaning that the tools are easy for our members to access when their green (or orange) thmbs are itching. We decided that it would be a good idea to engrave our initials KOA (which also means happy in Te Reo Maori) into the tools for extra security.

- Vorry has also asked us if we can support the development of a model urban garden around the outside of the community center, and help to maintain the existing- yet rather neglected raised beds, to serve as an inspiration fo others who a re trying to grow food in the city.

- One of our members- Ping, has been communication with the property manager of our local University (Victoria) and they have agrred to us developiong another garden plot in a unused section of theirs just up the road from our existing plot. We are very excited about this and have already begun planning what it will contain. We want to develop a herbal medicine garden, a mini orchard and a shade garden for edible plants able to grow in full shade conditions. We a re also planning to collect mulch from a local arborist and set up a community composting facility.

- More and more people in the community are asking to be involved in the project, we were recently contacted by the local school asking if we can help them with a plot of their own…the whole community is growing… inmore ways than one!

Nga mihinui

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At our last working bee this past sunday it was very inspiring to see that all our plants are surviving the winter chill- I guess the warmth of our community keeping the frosts away.

As the garden is now full of plants and the weeds are at bay, we have moved on to working on some of the more subtle and more complicated aspects of our garden plan.

We are using the great edible gardening  community networking site oooby (out of our own backyard) to host discussions on the following issues

- how should we manage the plots and harvesting?

- How can we collect water during the summer?

- What should our sign look like?

- Are we meeting enough

We are also encouraging people to take responsibility for different projects. Priorities are

-espaliering our trees

-setting up the worm bath

- developing our rest area

so hopefully we’ll see some exciting developments over the next few weeks

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The garden is looking wonderful,
the untreated wood chips seem to be keeping the snails away from our brassicas, and thanks to our white board- fridge other great tips like ‘used crushed egg shells to keep away slugs’ are starting to appear.

The fruit is looking to be a winner in our garden too as the currents are starting to bud up as the heart of winter passes. Also the lovely people at Mitre 10 mega have let us know that our dwarf apples and pears have arrived, so we should start experimenting with some espaliers soon.

However, all this growth and glory is highlighting just how much is still to be done. We have many unfinished projects on our list such as: developing a proper compost area, setting up a seating/relaxing area, getting the worm bath in action, creating a proper sign for our non-descript gate entrance and soting out how we will ge water into our garden in summer.

Luckily, we have our community garden meeting next week so we will hopefully make some ground in allocating task amongst our growing kai o te Aro whanau!

Watch this space

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Gosh it’s amazing what a a small group of hardworking

people can achieve in a couple of hours!

Today we planted out most of our new garden beds placed our shrubs and climbers where we thought they would do best. In a space which was completey covered with weeds a month ago, we now have the birth of a food forest, Feeloas, lemon, cranberry, raspbery, gooseberry, passionfruit, guava, braodbeans, brassicas, onions, shallots, garlic, spinnach, silver beet, kale, lettuce, strawberries, herbs, artichoke…the list goes on.

We enriched the beds with compost and worm juice from our home bins and mulched them with untreated wood shavings we received from a local picture framer.

This project just keeps getting better! Thanks Fiskars and Mitre 10!

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Things really got started when our wonderful new Fiskars tools arrived and we finalised the arrangements to pick up our first load of plants from Mitre 10 Mega!

We also put an old fridge into the garden for storage and also to serve as a giant white-board.. now that’s what I call kiwi ingenuity!

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Now that we could see what we working with…a very pleasant view it was too- we measured up the site and had a meeting dedicated to brainstorming what the future could bring to our garden. We used scale maps, garden books and coloured pencils to come up with heaps of ideas.

We took all our drawings down to the site and began to bring our visions to life. We began with defining where the paths and garden beds would be.

After the basic garden layout was complete, we left a scale concept map (laminatd to keep the rain out) on site so that new workers could easily follow the groups design.

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We had a moonlit meeting in Aro Valley’s Waimapihi reserve to formulate our plan of action.

At the next working bee,  our first priority was to get rid of as many of the noxious weeds as we could and get a better look at the site. We found many old broken bricks…which we immediately knew could be used to mark paths, and many other useful materials- even an old bath. The day was filled with laughter and joy as we all took part in transforming the site.

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