Common Ground

This past Sunday, we enjoyed a very nice Yum Char / Dim Sum brunch at the Majestic with friends from the Wellington Meetin network. We had the usual tasty, MSG-laden treats: dumplings, steamed buns, sticky rice, and sesame balls. It was a nice time. There were a couple of new people this week, which is great! Groups like Meetin, Welly Rocks and the American Women's Network have been really important tools for making friends and getting to know other people, so we like to encourage others (especially newcomers to NZ) to come along. Looking back, I never could have imagined I would be meeting so many interesting people from all over the world and all walks of life.

Meetin Wellington's International Brunch Crew: Pictured from left to right are (back row) Michele, Jane, Heather, Stacey and (front row) Alice, Phil, Loren, me, and James. Noticeably missing from the photo is Ange, who insisted on being the photographer so that she wouldn't have to be in the shot.

After lunch, Stacey headed to a movie (no? not a movie!) and I went to check out the Common Ground Community Garden. Community gardens are not really a new idea but they are experiencing a bit of a renaissance these days here in New Zealand. Kiwis, like many people around the world, are starting to ask critical questions about where their food comes from and what's behind it all.

The idea behind such gardens is to create semi-public spaces that are available to citizens for growing vegetables and other food crops. Participants share in the duties of the garden, which includes everything from moving compost piles (I did that on Sunday!) to planting seedlings. The garden becomes a micro-community, a place where people can get together and share information and form social bonds around a central effort. In the case of Common Ground, the land was made available through Sister Loyola of the Home of Compassion, herself a keen organic gardener. Click here for a very good article about the garden.

Nothing goes to waste in this garden. Old tyres are used as planters, and just about anything is used to form planting bed structures. The industrious gardeners use plastic scaffold sheeting (the blue stuff) to form protective wind buffers around the plants. The hill that Common Ground is located on is on receives strong (and sometimes cold) winds, so utilising trees and shrubs as a natural wind buffers will be important

The potential for learning in this project is huge and it's one of the reasons that I am interested. I've planted plenty of veggies in my day and done pretty well overall, but I've never done it from scratch. All my plants came from store-bought seeds or seedlings. I want to know how to harvest my own seed and preserve it from year to year. In the event that we someday buy a home, I'm keen to use permaculture techniques, something that they are doing at Common Ground and many other members are interested in as well. Composting (something I've tried with limited success) and worm farming (never done) are also on my list.

Tomatoes come in a lot more versions than just 'cherry' and 'big'?

I am also really interested in 'heirloom vegetables'--species that were once commonly grown by individual gardeners but have now mostly disappeared. There is almost zero diversity on the grocery store shelves these days. Increasingly, large corporations are the ones owning and overseeing mass food production. Like all corporations, they are more concerned with streamlining the process and ensuring profits are made than creating food that's good for us. Under the guise of 'controlling the spread of genetic plants' (something they created anyway) the seed companies now keep farmers under their thumb by making 'terminator seed' that will not reproduce. So, farmers must keep coming back to the seed manufacturers year after year as captive customer. Nice, eh?

Some statistics on the topic of biodiversity of food crops:
from The Listener, 12 May 2007 - "Time to Sow"

• The Koanga Institute of New Zealand estimates that 95% of fruit and vegetable varieties once grown in New Zealand have been lost since 1920

• In 1950, 100 types of tomatoes were grown in New Zealand. In today's supermarkets there are an average of three species on offer

• In the U.S. in 1903, there were 46 different varieties of asparagus, 338 rock melons (cantaloupe) and 164 celery varieties on offer. Today, there are 3 varieties of asparagus, 27 rock melons, and three celery varieties

• The Koanga Institute took 59 varieties of heirloom apples and tested their nutritional value alongside 10 commercial varieties; without fail, the heritage apples had significantly higher nutritional density. Monty's Surprise, an old apple, had four times the nutritional value of the commercial Red Delicious.
  

A grass roots movement of "seed savers" is on the rise (both here and elsewhere) in an effort to re-discover all of these heirloom plants before it's too late. It's sad that it's come to this, really, an a bit surprising. How did we get so disconnected from things? Vegetable gardening holds such special memories for me, I am surprised that more people are not into it. I remember as a kid going over to Pop Price's house in Collinsville, exploring his huge pumpkin patch, and walking through my grandpa Nagel's garden so he could show off his horticultural accomplishments (he was a very proud gardener) There's nothing quite like growing your own food, really. It's great fun, good for you, and good for the planet as well.