Christchurch gardener Gavin Hawke: "It's all about waste streams rotting and creating some sort of circle of life." Photo: Supplied
A community garden in the Christchurch suburb of Sumner is growing food on the cheap.
The garden's creator is Gavin Hawke, and he's learning to garden in a way that's not just sustainable, but also regenerative.
And once a garden's set up right, there shouldn't be too much ongoing maintenance either, he says in the latest episode of RNZ's Thrift podcast
"It's not something we need to push, rather we just need to encourage nature to do it for us," says Hawke.
Hawke started He Māra Kai in 2022 on a 2000 square metre patch of land he leases from the Christchurch City Council. It was red zoned after the city's earthquake in 2011.
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Hawke wanted to get the garden up and running as cheaply as possible. He's opted for a form of Hügelkultur, a German word meaning rotting material and logs under the ground.
"Dig a trench, fill up with wood, driftwood, or your next door neighbour's green bin, cover that wood with the soil you've extracted it, and then put some compost on top," he says.
"You end up with a garden that you never need to fertilize and also the wood will create a soak so you end up conserving water."
Crucially, it's also very low-cost.
"I carted in my car about 200 metres of driftwood. It's sitting at the beach, so it's all free.
"If it's going to rot, grab it. It's all about waste streams rotting and creating some sort of circle of life."
Hawke is also a great believer in heirloom seeds.
"It's a plant that hasn't been modified, a traditional plant which is quite tolerant to bugs and sometimes lack of water."
Seeds can be picked up from seed banks and other community gardens, but if you do have to buy it should be a one-time purchase, he says.
A new garden under this system is best kicked off with leafy greens, which will thrive in new, decomposing soil, rather than root veggies.
"Once the plants are established, when the seeds dry up, you can just let some of them disperse themselves naturally.
"Within a few months, you'll have more seedlings coming up through the ground, so you don't have to keep buying new seed every year."
The second key task is feeding the soil so it can feed you, Hawke says. He runs a six-bay compost system at He Māra Kai.
Hawke scavenges for material for his compost bays and he makes a lot, getting through a cubic metre a week. But the mix has to be right, he says.
"You don't want to just chuck a whole lot of green grass in, you need to have 50-50 browns and greens."
'Brown' matter is leaves, straw and wood chips, 'green' is all the other stuff - scraps and garden waste.
Compost is the key to a healthy living soil, he says.
"Everywhere in the garden when you dig it up, you can just feel life. You can smell it. You can see everything moving in it.
"Soil is not something that we just want to use as a medium to grow something, it just doesn't hold a plant up. It's got to provide the nutrients, and it's got to be alive, it's got to be different textures and smell good, and provide habitats, as well as growing food."
Almost everything in Hawkes' garden is built from found material, even the shed is made from driftwood and old roof iron.
"People probably see me as here's that scavenger walking around with his bins every lunchtime, picking up scraps. Actually, I don't care. I quite like the fact that I'm actually using that material to create life."
Gavin Hawke Photo: Supplied
Gavin Hawke's tips for gardening on the cheap:
- Don't worry about how much space you have. You can still start a garden with just a few seeds either gifted or bought.
- Create your own beds by burying some wood that will decompose, providing fertiliser and a beneficial environment for insects and worms.
- Start with simple projects like leafy greens that grow above the ground while your soil is getting ready,
- Make up your own compost, sourcing scraps from supermarkets, cafes and your friends and neighbours, green bins.
- Grow a diverse mix of plants to benefit the whole environment.
- Create a permaculture and as your plants go to seed, put the dry heads away for the next year's crop.
