Gardening Group

The Gardening Group was set up in winter 2008, and meets regularly at each others' gardens on the first Sunday of each month. Our mission statement is:

"To enable and encourage the expansion and efficiency of urban sustainable gardens and food production."

We are learning skills from each other while becoming friends. In June 2009 we started the Old Homestead Community Garden on Pt Chevalier Road, and are keen to set up other community gardens as other land becomes available.

Diary:

Please add gardening group news and photos in reverse chronological order here:

14 Apr 2015: An update from the Garden Group.

3 Oct 2010: Invitation to all keen gardeners to Heidi's place for the first Garden Group meeting of Spring !

1 Nov 2009: Cecile's turn to host today and what a treat to see a mini "community garden" - Cecile is gardening in the garden shared by 6 units, and has created an orchard of fruit trees and berry bushes, with well-thought through companion plantings of vegetables and flowers in raised planter boxes. And all while leaving plenty of lawn for every one else's needs. Very cool. Thanks Cecile for letting the children tumble through and steal the raspberries.

3 Oct 2009: Good turnout today at Megan's for our seed swap. I realised how many of the plants I've been growing are now from swapped seed from this group. Thanks guys! And again I managed to find what I needed - especially capsicums and chillies. Megan's place is wonderful. Very inspiring to see what pockets of sunshine can be captured on a South-facing slope if you think creatively. Cecile turned out to be a great source of hessian sacks, and amongst the seedlings that were swapped were Heidi's Golden Queen peach seedlings.

13 Sep 2009: Jo's garden was roday's venue. and it was inspiring to see how productive the small garden of a townhouse can be. Deryn took over as the communications person for the group. Yay to Deryn. We planned that at the next meeting we have another seed and seedling swap. We wondered if we could be any help to Pt Chev School in helping with the re-landscaping plans (Keren says the plans are coming along fine but later on we could definitely help with implementing the plans). We then went on to plan the garden plan for the Old Homestead Community Garden.

2 Aug 2009: Today we met at Stu and Michelle's place, where we saw the very productive passionfruit vine which was scrambling over the heavily-laden, massive tangelo tree. It's amazing how many sunny niches there are for vegetables when the land is sloping to the North. Many hands made light work of pruning the overgrown grape vine. We discussed carrots and chickens, then helped ourselves to a great array of seedlings, seed potatoes, flower bulbs and globe artichoke plants. We discussed choosing crops for the Old Homestead Community Garden.

6 Jul 2009: After a brief working bee at the Old Homestead Community Garden, we carpooled to Jenny's garden in Te Atatu. Jenny has some seriously amazing greens in her garden. I'm sure that Jenny's laissez-faire approach must be only part of the secret - her soil has something my soil doesn't! Some seedlings were swapped, and some of us took away cuttings from her keffir lime and seeds from the kanuka. We discussed the Old Homestead Community Garden.

May and June 2009: The gardening group is having great fun. We've been meeting at each other's gardens (big and small, but all wonderful, evolving and edible), swapping seeds and plant material. We've put in combined orders for heritage fruit trees, and purchased barley strawbales and bird netting in bulk to reduce cartage and cost. Recently one of our members offered us saffron corms at a decent price; the variety of plants we're growing is steadily increasing. At the May meeting we had a little "tutorial" in seed sowing, pricking out and growing on. It was interesting to swap ideas.

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