Peter Russell, a trustee of Waiheke Community-Supported Agriculture.

However, a group of people committed to the idea of growing food locally have extended the thought into action on a piece of flat coastal land with a perfect view of the Te Matuku Bay oyster farm.

The group – called Waiheke Community-Supported Agriculture – is made up of between 15 and 20 island residents who have been given the free lease of about half an acre of land by Waiheke landowner and environmentalist Rob Fenwick.

They’ve employed a part time grower, Claire Mummery, to test and prepare the soil, plant the seeds and tend the garden, and are now receiving a box of organically grown vegetables per week in the summer and one every two weeks in the winter.

“When we first got the land, I did two soil tests, the Reams and the Lismore, which tell you what you have and what you need to improve,” says Claire. “And on the basis of that I’ve added two natural fertilisers, Nano-Cal which unlocks calcium in the soil and another called Bio Rocket which helps to keep nitrogen in the soil and the atmosphere. Also, the kikuyu grass, which was everywhere strangling everything, has reduced because it likes degraded soil and the soil isn’t degraded anymore.”

To prove the point she shows off a very healthy-looking box of produce just picked from the garden; glossy leeks, spinach and big, red beetroot are in season at the moment. In the summer the garden yielded corn, lettuce and tomatoes, a good range of summer vegetables.

Peter Russell is one of the group and a trustee. He has driven me out to the land and is sensibly wearing gumboots knowing it will be muddy, but even in this fallow winter season there are still lines of leafy vegetables under netting and looking well-tended.

“It’s fantastic. We get a box every two weeks and even though at the moment we probably haven’t got our initial investment of $500 back from it yet, we know it’s all part of a process and we can’t expect full productivity in our first year.”

He explains that this project is not typical of the usual community-supported agriculture projects, which work with a farmer who is supported financially, to cultivate their land by an outside group who share both the profits (the produce) and the risk (failed crops, loss of money).

“In this case, we are employing a grower to develop the land and the landowner Rob Fenwick receives his box of vegetables along with everyone else. He is a generous man and we’ve been very fortunate to have the use of his land.”

Known for his work in supporting the growing and distribution of locally grown food with his initiative ‘Out of Our Own Back Yards’ (OOOBY), Peter and his wife Katherine and young son Toby, are actually relatively new to the island.

“We were living in Sydney and we made a list of everything we wanted in a place to live and that list narrowed down to Waiheke. We came for a visit, then a holiday and then we moved here permanently in 2008. We fell in love with the place and this community has changed how we view things and how we want to live.”

From a relatively money-focussed background in Sydney where he ran a successful business sourcing food from Europe and other countries for distribution within Australia, Peter says he has now gone to the other extreme.

“This project is all about generating our own food near where we live and distributing it only as far as it will feed the group we have. At the moment that group is about 20, but we hope to expand it to around 50 subscriptions. Making a profit is not the point of it.”

The idea, he says, is to access more land all over the island, so more and more of us are eating healthily and locally with the added advantage of enriching our soil and not being reliant on outside sources for our food.

With the Te Matuku garden, the produce is harvested and taken to a central point in Ostend where it’s packed into boxes for the subscribers to pick up.

“We have all paid an amount of money up front to support the planting and cultivation of the garden, rather than paying per box of food received. We accept that some weeks the box might be fuller than others depending on what’s happening in the garden.”

The whole concept is a similar idea to the community garden projects except that they tend to rely on all the ‘consumers’ of the food doing the labour in the garden rather than employing one person to do most of the work for the group.

As we go back up the long driveway to the road, we laugh about the fact that this community gardening idea is considered forward thinking. It’s just going back to what we used to do before we got so disconnected from the source of our food and what gets put in it.

Common sense really. •

Julianne Evans