Cafe has offer for back yard gardeners

Otago Daily Times

3 days ago

Dunedin homeowners are being invited to apply to grow vegetables and fruit in their back yards for a local organic cafe.
Taste Nature managing director Clinton Chambers said he hoped to contract four homeowners initially for 12 months, with an expectation the initiative — called Whakapapa o nai kai (Food Provenance) — will continue beyond next year.
Mr Chambers said the hospitality industry was typically "appalling" when it came to caring where its food came from, deciding what it wanted to cook then looking for ingredients.
"We want to turn that on its head and say this is the food we have access to here. How about our chefs work back from that?"
The cafe wants people to volunteer now for his initiative, with a hope they will begin growing in spring.
The successful applicants will need to own an uncontaminated garden, be prepared to commit 5-10 hours a week tending it and pay for their own gardening equipment, such as tools or glasshouses.
Taste Nature will pay for garden design and gardener training and also help the urban gardeners grow and harvest in ways that meet food safety rules and that are hua parakore, an indigenous system of growing food developed by Te Waka Kai Ora (the Māori Organics Authority of Aotearoa).
Taste Nature, which already grows produce at its own Waitati garden, said it would pay wholesale market prices for the backyard gardeners' produce.
The initiative hoped to sustain community growing by giving homeowners a "supplementary income from a garden they currently don't use", Mr Chambers said.
He hoped the initiative would also raise awareness about the importance of a local, sustainable food system compared with a reliance on industrial-scale farming, Mr Chambers said.
The word "fresh" was often used in the food industry to describe produce that had been grown using pesticides, transported long distances incurring carbon miles and required refrigeration. It was misleading greenwashing, he said.
The food produced by Taste Nature's initiative would be harvested and eaten on the same day in soups, salads and smoothies. The growers would also be encouraged to save seeds that could be sold in the Taste Nature shop.
He hoped the scheme would be expanded to growing grains in the future.
Rory Harding, who transformed his 300sqm site in George St into a fruit orchard, welcomed the initiative and stressed that backyard growing had an upfront cost, but could produce significant amounts of food and save on food bills.
Below his fruit trees, Mr Harding has planted native grasses, perennial flowers and medicinal herbs.
"It becomes a humming ecosystem that is healthy for nature and us."