Auckland District Council of Social Services
Community Gardens Forum October 2016
Opening Addresses by presenters
David Haigh
My name is David Haigh, I am the Chair of the Auckland District Council Social Services. I am also a member of the Grafton Community Garden. That has been going for seven years, and Richard Main from Gardens4Health was a fantastic help in giving advice and putting us in touch with other people. So I have always remembered those visits by Richard, it wasn’t just one, he came back a number of times to see how we were getting on. So thank you from Grafton as well.
Community Gardens ticks all the wellbeing boxes (social, economic, environmental and cultural). Social wellbeing creates friendships, central supports that people receive, health, the good quality food that people are eating from Community Gardens. I read in the paper the other day a Finnish study that, if you work on a garden for half an hour a day, there is a reduced chance of heart trouble and it reduces it by 50%, which is incredible. So that is the social box.
The economic box includes harvesting good quality food which has an economic value and the environmental box, involves sustainability, care for the soil, working with the seasons, the climate, improving the soil, providing flowers for beauty and for the bees.
In terms of cultural wellbeing, I think there are two aspects that struck me; the first is that gardening has a culture of its own. There is a gardening culture where you just have to work with the seasons and work with the plants, work with the soil. There is also a cultural wellbeing in relation to people’s cultural knowledge of different ethnic groups. They have certain knowledge that they can put into practice and I think all this leads up to things that the Auckland District Council Social Services have been advocating for years: sustainability and community development.
I want to welcome Richard Main from Gardens4Health. Richard has done so much to spread the message of gardening and community gardening.
Richard Main
Thank you David and thank you to ADCOSS for this opportunity to share with you today our experience of gardens and health experiences in the garden environment.
The key aspect of this presentation or this forum this morning is around revolution to evolution and I have actually seen this revolution quietly just ticking away over the last seven or ten years quite remarkedly and I sense that things are changing now. So we are actually moving somewhere else. So we are moving really into a more sphere of the social, psychological, the spiritual wellbeing of actually connecting with the land, connecting with papatuanuku, and connecting people with the land, connecting people together.
So it is about being there and savouring the moment in the community garden environment. It is about gardening together and making cross cultural connections. Now we have 160 or more different ethnic groups represented in Auckland and that actually occurs in the garden environment and I must say that I and my team, (Harry’s here today) we have a great deal of learning that is ongoing because of what we can learn from other people, from other cultures. It is about sharing knowledge. It is about best practice and we have a very strong focus on organic best practice in the garden. In fact, I was at Kelmarna Gardens yesterday, which is a certified organic space, and that is going through some transitions at the moment but we are confident that we will progress and move back into sort of thrive mode.
Seeds are important and one thing we do in Gardens4Health, we have a seed bank. Other groups do the same. The Auckland Seed Savers Network, so we believe that sharing that seed and, of course, sharing the food. So sharing the food is really important. Improving self-esteem and growing a positive outlook ready for wellness and we say work out in the garden rather than work out in the gym. It is a much better environment. It is a much more connecting type of environment and, finally, just keep moving, your mood growing, your relationship with papatuanuku. So I guess for many of us here we do have that strong relationship but many more of us can actually help others make that connection.
I certainly know many of us who are a little older, that when we were young we were deeply immersed in the environment, connected with the soil. We got soil on our hands and fingers, it got into our bodies and basically there is a bacteria, this micro citizen of ours who actually is a very beneficiallyorganism and helps us to feel good. So we should be out there getting soil in our fingernails on a regular basis because it actually makes us feel better about our lives and it feels better about being together. So it is also about having fun in the garden. We can celebrate Matariki, we can celebrate the seasonal changes that occur in the garden, we can celebrate the best story online, do so many different things to enjoy and have fun in the garden, because if we are not having fun in the garden, well we shouldn’t be doing it at all.
And I think really truly from our experiences, the bottom up approach is really the way to go. That is, being community driven. We do need the top down support and that might be by way of some funding or some sponsorship from organisations but, really, we need a bottom up approach. I have seen both models work and ultimately longer term the core community being driven from bottom up is the best solution for community in action.
So, one of the options is that we create local community webs and that is being done out in West Auckland over the years under the Waitakere City Council model. The Puketapapa local board some years ago initiated a garden web connection to bring people together around food. So there are lots of opportunities for us in your locality, in your neighbourhood, in your community, get things moving. And on a regional basis, we can do it, but there are other groups, particularly the Soil Association, the Tree Crop Association, Biodynamic Association, lots of other groups, Eco Matters Trust for instance and Auckland Permaculture Network. So all of those sort of groups are an opportunity for us to actually come together on a regional basis.
The real crux of a good community garden is one operating with a core group. One or two people struggle. I see it all the time when one person, the key person leaves, gardens tend to sometimes collapse, they fall apart. The other key component is if there is an opportunity to pay people. This is a big issue because most of the gardens are run by volunteers but the gardens that do have somebody or people who are part paid, like Adrian at Kelmarna Gardens, they are critical, they are pivotal, and so we are saying fair pay for those people, because they are highly skilled. They are not only highly skilled gardeners and growers, but they are highly skilled in terms of building social networks, communicating and linking with people.
So we should also look to do more of the sharing food and sharing experiences. That is really critical. I was at Kelmarna supervising there yesterday as Adrian Roach, the supervisor, was on leave and we did a bit of a mahi, the tour in the morning. By about 11.30 we decided okay we have got to get prepared for lunch. So, of course there is a huge abundance of greens and herbs and flowers, and so we collected them together, and we took it down to the shed, the old cow shed which is now the kitchen, and we brewed up a butternut soup with some spices, some bread was delivered from a local bakery and we enjoyed a great time around the table and that’s how it should be. So experiences are really important as well and I think gardening is about great stories, incredible stories.
Children are really part of this equation in a big way. I love our contact with kids, e.g. Tuakau Primary School. There is an orchard that they developed about four years ago and the whole school came out and were part of that process of planting. Kids are our futures. If we can instil in them a good sense of growing food, they can take that through their whole lives. So my sense is the three year to seven year old age group is really critical to get some of those ideas in their minds and get some of those skills through their early lives.
This is easy to do really, making cultural food connections. We have Mr Zang who is a fabulous Chinese gardener on the North Shore, Homer works with the Asian community, part of our network, he grows a huge array of Chinese vegetables. When I first visited there two years ago I was astounded by the range of food. This is food out of China that I have never seen before. Lettuces growing one and a half metres high, yams growing in rows. He has now moved on to growing water chestnuts in an especially created environment. We have so much to learn from our huge ethnic diverse population.
I am sensing that some of the community gardens are forging a new pathway to more of a social enterprise approach. So they are not going to rely on funding anymore, they are not going to rely on sponsorship, they are going to generate some income, they are going to plough that back into their project and selling at the local market like the Grey Lynn Market is one thing, the Sanctuary Garden here at Unitec are generating like $7,000-$10,000 quite easily per year. They are even selling flowers.
There is a Refugee Centre garden to expose new refugees to gardening under Auckland conditions and the other garden where the kids are involved is the Tongan Gardens and you are going to be hearing from some of their people a bit later on this afternoon. That is actually run by the Tongan Health Trust in Onehunga.
Create a compost collective party is another component of this sense of moving your mood and I find that making hot compost is actually one of the most rewarding things to do in a garden. There are just so many opportunities for people to be part of that. You can have a whole team approach, you can do it as a family, you can do it as a community group and it is very rewarding just to be part of that process and also to see the end result. So, Auckland Council are actually very geared up for a compost collective network to support your communities in around biodegradable food waste and the best use of that. So you can tap into the compost collector if you wish. You can also go onto the Council websites and you can actually see a lot of information. You can also source some funding from Council for your composting endeavours.
So that brings to the end of this presentation. It is all about moving your mood I believe and this is a transition out of the revolution to more of an evolution of what we are doing in the community garden setting. Thank you.
David Haigh
Thank you very much Richard.
We have our second speaker: Wayne Walker. Wayne, congratulations. You have just been re-elected to Council in the Albany Ward, which is no mean feat. It is a big, complex Ward and for you to win with your co-councillor, I think is a fantastic achievement. Wayne has been an advocate for sustainability, he has been a champion within the Auckland Council, within the region, for sustainability and we welcome you here Wayne. Thank you very much.
Wayne Walker
Great to be here and really good to meet up with a number of people that I know. Richard and I go back a long way, back to the 70s I think when we had something called EPI Centre, which was the Environment and Peace Information Centre in Symonds Street. I was very involved with that and so was Richard and we have progressed and we meet up regularly on an ongoing basis, sometimes to watch a movie, amongst other things, and generally to have a bit of a vegetarian lunch or the like. So David is actually right. I was very privileged to be re-elected with my running mate John Watson. Hard work and very much a grass roots campaign involving people in the community to get behind us and help us. This is my third term on the Auckland Council, so from the beginning, then the next term and now this term and my role generally has been promoting environmental causes. We have had a small environment sustainability, natural heritage, climate change committee in one shape or another over the previous two terms and I am hopeful that in the new Council under the leadership of Phil Goff we can rack up the environment because, in my opinion, it has suffered somewhat to date, particularly because of the need to pack in houses around Auckland, the emphasis on growth and, in my view, a rather permissive regime that has underplayed the importance of the natural environment, our rivers, our streams, our parks, our natural areas, all of those things. So all of us need to be involved in exercise in lifting the game, engaging with the Council, engaging with our communities to heighten those concerns and those opportunities.
So I am just going to cover off a few things in the background and I will speak to it a little bit later. There is a wonderful community garden that I visited called Veg Out in St Kilda, Melbourne. Whenever I am travelling around, irrespective of whether it is in New Zealand or it is overseas, I always seek out the community gardens, I usually visit there, I go and have a look around, I take some photos and I try and apply those things myself and this place was really awesome. When I go through some of the slides later I will just pick out some of the things that I think are relevant that very much build on the message that Richard was talking about. As far as the context of community gardens with Council is concerned, you probably know that Council has a range of policies and strategies. There are a number of things that are part of the Auckland plan, which was the widely consulted engaged plan that covers off environmental health concerns, a whole range of things across Auckland and if you look through heaps of areas in that, you can read between the lines that community gardens can have an incredibly strong part to play and, without wanting to repeat too much around all of the things that Richard raised, there are issues obviously around food, let’s face it, a whole variety of issues around the environment, issues around low carbon, reducing our carbon footprint, composting, education, the growing diversity that we have got within Auckland and the wonderful opportunity that community gardens make to bring people together through all of the sorts of shared experiences that Richard was making and because of the pace of change that we have in Auckland in respect of the amount of immigration that we have, that need is more than ever. Quite obviously, just going back to food and education and families and all of those things, particularly given the circumstance where we are going to have a lot more people living in apartments, people that are not going to have easy access to gardens. There are huge needs to have community gardens in those parts of Auckland where we have people in those apartments and you know that within those people living in apartments you have got lots of diversity and a real need to build the fabric of communities. There are other obvious things that we are certainly familiar with around seed saving, around avoiding the use of genetically modified organisms and obviously, sustainability. Community gardens tend to embrace that sort of concept. So, community gardens very much pull all of these sorts of things together but, as far as Council is concerned, it is not obvious enough and there is a big need for people like yourself to get together to pick up on the concept that Richard was putting that this needs to be driven by the community and certainly, in my opinion, it needs to be owned by the community. So the community needs to put those principals together, as they apply not just to Council but to other organisations like schools, like churches, like anywhere frankly, where there is a vacant space that could be used to put a garden. It could be a Guerrilla Garden. One of the things that I am going to be doing soon and I will encourage other people to do it, is you collect seed from all sorts of places. When plants are in seed, it is easy, and then you go around and you just pop the seed somewhere.
Yes, so one of the things that I am presently doing for example is collecting a bunch of pumpkin seed and I am just going to plant some pumpkins all over the place and they will just pop up. Where people are going to find the pumpkins and eat the pumpkins remains to be seen. There are lots of locations alongside roads and motorways where you can pop seeds because often the birds are not necessarily going to poop them, and you can just literally take over a space and maybe start putting something in there, without necessarily asking for permission, and that is what it is all about and that is where the Guerrilla Gardening concept comes in and I think we need to do a lot more than that. We have got to push the boundaries as much as we can.