('COUNTRY CALENDAR' THEME) - The best of New Zealand's rural heartland... - This 17ha community garden may seem a little overgrown. - It might look like a hot mess to you guys, but it's actually doing exactly what it needs to do. - You don't get those in the supermarket. - The combination of doing the permaculture, doing the matauranga seems pretty unique to me. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. www.able.co.nz Copyright Able 2024 - It's all hands on deck at Ngapeke Permaculture in Welcome Bay near Tauranga. - I know we're coming to the end of the season, but pretty sure we'll find some. - Volunteers have gathered to harvest for Ngapeke's newest venture ` community co-op boxes. - Nice and fresh. - It's a far cry from only five years ago, when this land was barren and dry. - When we came to the property, the soil was very compacted and quite, uh, dusty, you know, wasn't` didn't have a lot of organic matter in it. - Rina Walker, also known as Auntie to anyone who meets her here, heads Ngapeke Permaculture. The 17ha block had been leased out to local farmers, but Rina's leading the drive to turn the land into an environmental haven. - We're going into our sixth year. They were growing maize on at least two-thirds of the property for about 16 years. Prior to that, it was a dairy farm. That was probably a good 30, 40 or so years. - With help from right-hand man Ole Gaspar, originally from Brazil, a combination of matauranga Maori, or Maori knowledge, and permaculture principles are being used to revitalise this Ngati Pukenga land. - We're almost doing in full circle, right? Climate change means that we have to really think and be thoughtful about how we might do something, and I find that we're going back to what my tupuna used to do. So there's a lot of learning in that, and not just here in Aotearoa. Across the globe, actually, a lot of indigenous practices are starting to come back. - Hey, there's a waspnest here. This is the Brazilian way, OK? They're dangerous. - If we don't, then they become a real problem for us. We used a mix of 40-odd different seeds and nitrogen fixes and, you know, our groundbreaking root crops and all that kind of thing to open up the soil, to add lots of organic matter and really build up the microorganisms in the soil. - All of that stuff here is edible stuff. September last year, our tractor broke, and then we didn't have tools enough to be able to do the whole thing. - To keep it down. - To keep it down. - But this is ideally how we want to have it. And so we would come in and cut and drop, cut and drop each time, maybe twice a year at certain times of the year. - Because it's so labour-intensive, Ngapeke draws on a keen pool of volunteers to keep things moving. - Hey, I'm just one little old lady, you know. I came into the project with my eyes wide open. We're gonna need help and lots of it. I thought it was a good opportunity, actually, to teach people about what permaculture is, they can come and be active, and that's how we've done it since day one. Hey, girls. - And there's always plenty to do here. - So the sugar cane gonna look like that. The group that we have here today, they're part of a youth group that we run. We meet fortnightly. We came here before to plant and help Auntie. So today, it's always a good day to come in and support her. But we also run our alternative education programme from another trust called Te Aranui. The kids from that programme come here during the week to support Auntie, but it's also connecting them back to their whakapapa and the land. - Legacy McVeigh from Ngati Pukenga is one of those who lends a hand. - Just a good environment, you know, good community, learn heaps, mean feeds. Yeah. - It's an open-door policy ` Anybody and everybody can come in, and they do. (LAUGHS) - Preparation and planning are constant for crops year round. These beds are ready for this year's planting of Ngapeke's star crop, king garlic. - We have different layers of mulch, woodchip, grass clips and the cardboard box. The fungi is, like, pumping. - The next layer, we can put some more grass clips on top, and then we can bring the compost out from the chooks. - These are the seeds for the garlic. Looks like an onion, but these are the best seeds to use for it. We're probably going gonna plant around maybe 800 or 1000 seeds, and they will give us around 300kg to 400kg of garlic. After we harvest, we need to dry, so this is why we just create this to put it. It's very hot up here and is drying really well. So today is the day to process the whole thing. - A couple? - Yep. - John Rothery is one of the core group of volunteers here at Ngapeke. - One of the things that really impresses me is not just the knowledge that you get from everybody that comes here, but it's also the fact that we're making a small contribution to people's lives in terms of affordable food. - With the garlic harvested, the main focus at this time of the year is on the kumara beds. - I'm just harvesting some of the kumara, uh, just to see how they're going. We can start to eat now, but it's still a another month ago. For me, the mara is the place where we can grow food and grow people. I like the Maori proverb that says, 'He aha te mea nui o te ao? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.' I think, uh, we do this so we can, uh, do it together, but we feed together, and we` we live together. Bringing some of my kids here and seeing the healing come into their lives and transformation come into their lives. So it's pretty cool. - Gardeners are always experimenting, no matter whether you're doing something big like this or you've got a raised garden in your backyard. The most inventive people, I reckon, are gardeners. - And it's this approach that has caught the eye of environmentalists and scientists alike. - Come on over here. Kia ora, everybody. - Ngapeke Permaculture near Tauranga in Bay of Plenty is becoming recognised for its unique approach to sustainable gardening practices. - So this is permaculture, but it sits alongside our matauranga Maori. The culture and the value system is embedded in the design as well. I know it might look like a hot mess to you guys, but (CHUCKLES) it's actually doing exactly what it needs to do. So you'll see natives sit alongside nut trees, avocados, peach trees. Most of our work is charitable. Most of our mahi is about giving back to the community. This is our tropics area. We're five years down now, and money has never been the driver of this project. However, it's a necessary tool. It's a necessary resource. So I'm having eco tours now, cos the property is looking a lot different to what it was five years ago, and we want to show that to people. Thank you so much for coming and learning about what we do here. - It's all brand new to me. It's good to learn about it ` how we reuse resources and how you catch the rain and the importance of different types of species and the purposes that they have. It's just really cool. - It's not only those on the eco tours who were curious to find out more about the approach here. Waikato University has paired up with Ngapeke to look at traditional ways of planting and expanding kumara growing. - OK. Yeah, watch your feet here. - Oh, wow. That's amazing. Yeah, there's just food everywhere. - Waikato University has come on board to support what we do, but also to reaffirm what we do and prove the science behind what we do. Like, we know it already worked, but it's like science is trying to catch up. Because our matauranga drives a lot of our initiatives and our planning, that's not readily available to the world of science. - You don't see those in the supermarket, do you? - No. - (CHUCKLES) They're insane. - Amazing. Shane Stuart from Priority One, the region's economic development organisation, is joining Waikato University's Chris Battershill for a site visit. - They do a lot of amazing stuff here. They're a real example of how getting past either-ors in discussions, so it's not just social or economic or environmental, it's not just matauranga or Western. They're all holistically done together, and they're doing amazing things for the community as well as helping, I guess, our researchers and scientists develop their work. - God, they are massive, aren't they? - They have projects to do with some of the alternative herbicides and following matauranga principles for things, and also we've got an engineering student who's looking at how they might be able to automate or do human-assist technologies for some of the traditional kumara growing. - We don't do any ploughing here, so it's all` the gardens are built on the top. - Every time I come up here I learn something different, and just seeing how this patch here has blossomed from when I first came here a year or so ago, it's just incredible. The ultimate aim from our perspective, being coastal, is understanding how this type of permaculture lessens the run-off of things that we really don't want going into the systems ` herbicides and pesticides ` unnatural ones ` because that, we know, affects enormously what's happening down in the rivers and the estuaries. So it starts here on the land, and if we're smart, we'll be able to harness it, and it will direct the sort of science that we're doing ` and indeed, that's happening. - Education and matauranga Maori and science and all that is really big for me. So it's important to me to get the message out to everybody about how to grow kai sustainably. You know, there's so much food poverty in our country, and really, you know, what's it all about? - One of those who has benefited from Rina's drive to share knowledge is Shona Ua-Marsh from nearby play centre Giggles. - Hey, guys. Morena. - Morena. Maybe about four months now that we've been getting an abundance of kai from here. - Oh, look at that. Oh, that's so cool. - It's probably three times over have fed our whanau within the learning community, and we have over 70 families here on a daily. Wow. - We've got a popcorn! - Also we've had abundance to be able to take trollies of kai to our local food bank, fill our pataka, and it just keeps producing. It's been unreal. But you know what? We can use these for the seeds for our next lot. - Makes my heart, you know, all... (LAUGHS) What's the word? It's like I'm a proud nana of all these mokopuna. (CHILDREN SHOUT PLAYFULLY) - Does it smell delicious? - Yes. - It does. - It starts with the kids, and we wanna normalise this. This was normal for me back in the day, so that's really the driver ` make it normal. You know, we've already installed over 200 box gardens out there. We plan to do a lot more. - It's a kaupapa others in the community are happy to support. - Yeah, so it's really good organic compost. - Kerry Addison's family leased this land many years ago. - We used to graze here, and then the transition, we were fully supportive of it, and, um, so we just thought it was a great project to get on board with. Just jumped at it to help them in any way we could. Compost that we bring up from the Hawkes Bay... - Yeah. - ...from BioRich. It's a lovely organic compost. - Yeah, yeah, ka pai. - Just look how well it's broken down. We supply the compost just as Rina needs it. She just rings me and we just get on with it, and, um, yeah, it works really well. - Chur, bro. - Thank you. - Chur, my brother. - This kind of kaupapa attracts very community-minded people, and they come from all different corners of the community. They're very generous people. Everything is useful. Everything has a use around here. The less inputs you have, the more sustainable you can become. So we have very little inputs. The woodchip comes in because we don't have enough forested areas here to have our own woodchip. So it's a good partnership with our arborists, because they actually pay a lot of money to dump the woodchip. We don't charge them here because that stuff is so valuable to us. We have compost coming in, but that's only for our garden beds that we do out in the community. - Sleepers for community garden boxes are also donated by local business Sequel, an initiative started by Ray Totorewa during Covid. - I don't know anything about gardening, actually ` koretake. Noa tenei. But I can make these things and put them up. So I reached out to Whaea Rina, and I said, 'Oh, I can't do this without you.' And she said, 'I can help you,' which is good, cos they have all the expertise and all that sort of stuff. They offer all sorts of wonderful things, like workshops, to help sustain these gardens. So, ka pai, Auntie. So all my timber is out there, and all the soil, and so we're just working side by side. Tena whakamakuku i te...? - Yeah. Te wai. (SOFT ACOUSTIC MUSIC) - From growing kai to cooking it, the last crop to be harvested at this time of the year is the pumpkins. (MUSIC CONTINUES) - Beautiful pumpkins for our soup. (IDYLLIC MUSIC) (INDISTINCT CHATTER) - READS: Ngapeke... - Miere. - Miere. - Miere. It's honey. - Next door to the gardens at Te Whetu o Te Rangi marae, Rina's sister, Rahera Ohia, is holding a workshop where pumpkin soup is on the menu. - We have a strong sense of... people needing to connect with the land they're on. So that's what we're trying to create, and I think the thing is that this is teaching us the practical implications of... Te Tiriti o Waitangi, of the relationship between Maori and Pakeha, you know, because we're doing it in a way that is... from which trust evolves, and therefore, we're always going to be together... making sure our entire community is operating at the best it can. - It's an holistic view that extends to the local awa, which used to be a place to gather kai, but in recent years has been unusable due to pollution. - We're trying to create a pool of people who understand we need to work hard on ensuring that our... coastal community here, our coastal kainga here, is sustainable forever, and we can't achieve that by just continuing to do things in the way that we've always done them. That's what's wrong. We need to do things better than that. - Taonga species specialist Chrissy McCloud is key to the restoration project. - In here we've got a whole lot of natives, and we've been out and collected seed locally. So we've brought them back here, cleaned them all up, sown them in trays, and we're busy propagating those at the moment. Ngapeke is involved in a number of local planting projects and is happy to share knowledge with others who want to do the same. Te Iringa Hikatanga moved from Auckland last year with a vision for her own whanau land. - Oh my gosh, it just fills my wairua, being able to be here, um... and manifest aspirations of the whenua, ae. Cos it's been cropped in maize for many, many years, um, our whanau have had eyes off it, off the whenua, so there's a lot of degradation there. This is such a beautiful space to be working in. It gives us confidence that our whenua is gonna change too, and it's not going to take long to actually do that, yeah ` because it's showing here. - I like the weekly ones because it helps us take care of our tahuna, which is really important to us, Te Tahuna o Rangataua. So, yeah, keeping the water filtered and clean before it actually gets out into the tahuna, that's a big thing for us. We're planting manuka today because it will help with soaking up some of the moisture in here ` they do like wet areas ` and we're also wanting to attract more birds and insect wildlife here, so food for the birds. We had lots of flooding last year. I think it was about four big flood events. All the area was under water, so these will act as a filter so that not a lot of paru goes out into the tahuna. - Those weeds are a bit of a hoha. Our approach to things to do with the land actually go all the way up to Otawa all the way down to the moana and out to the ocean. When we think about what we do here, we think about those areas as well. We're not really just doing it for here. It's the big picture ` that we're doing our best to be kaitiaki. - Harlem Tihema has been on Ngapeke's volunteer team for just over a year. - Oh, it's been amazing. I love coming here. I spend, uh, every single day in the school holidays to come here, when Ole lets me. - I just hope that we all realise that there's some major changes going on. And I'm no scientist, but I'm a whenua person, and I see this day in, day out. There is some major things going on in our environment that we need to at least be thinking about. And if you're in a position to be actively changing something in order to get something better, then that's the way to go. - Fa'afetai Iesu foai mai meaai tausi ai matou le fanau. Amene. - ALL: Amene. - This seems to be challenging times for the te ao Maori and for government, you know, initiatives and so on. Unless we can come together like good Treaty partners should, then we can find those common grounds and at least actively be doing something together as Treaty partners. My gosh, we got plenty examples of that going on around here. So get good at having a relationship with one another, and then we can do some awesome things. - ALL: # Tauranga moana. - # Tauranga Mauao te maunga. - # Mauao te maunga. ('COUNTRY CALENDAR' THEME) - Next time ` she gives wild horses a chance at a new life... - Go, Mark, go! They've all succeeded. They've all gone on to live a great life. Go! - ...and she gives purpose to the most misunderstood animals. - There's not a less athletic-looking horse that we own. He looks like a hot cross bun with legs. - That's next time on Hyundai Country Calendar.