Today a small, keen group worked in the community garden to prepare for our working bee tomorrow to get ready for planting the fruit trees arriving this month.
The community garden is really a ‘food forest’ that will eventually include a wonderful mixture of fruit trees, berries, herbs and support trees that will grow into a self-sustaining ecosystem. We’re developing it following permaculture principles to create a diverse and integrated system that is rich in plant, insect and microbe life, and recycles nutrients and doesn’t need many inputs from us. …
We had a great meeting at the site of the Community Garden on Sunday, having invited all the neighbours to discuss the project and contribute with ideas and feedback. Everyone who turned out was enthusiastic and eager to participate, so we are looking at getting things moving ahead. With this in mind – everyone in the community is invited to a meeting at 7pm, Thursday 19 October at the School Hall to contribute to the planning for the immediate and longer term future of the garden.
If you have anything you would like to put on the agenda; ideas and feedback, skills, materials or other resources to contribute, please feel free to message here or comment on the Facebook posts’s discussion.
We planted 30 trees today, mostly tagasaste, which fixes nitrogen and helps to improve the soil, and can later be be coppiced for firewood and sacrificial mulch. It will serve to shelter the holly oaks while they get established to form the main long-term shelter. We even managed to sneak some lavender amongst proceedings too. Many thanks to everyone who turned up to help!
To celebrate Her Royal Majesty’s birthday, let’s build a compost station and some raised beds after lunch on Monday. Kick-off at 1pm on Monday 5 June (more event details here), and subject to availability we can get a few tree and nursery species in the ground too.
Things we need
Used pallets (7 initially)
Some sleeper timbers
Lengths of driftwood from the beach
Plants. Currently, donations will be gratefully accepted of the following trees and shrubs for the nursery and beginning shelter layers: tagasaste (Cytisus proliferus), holly oak (Quercus ilex), common lavender (Lavendula augustifola), and feijoa (any good variety).
It might be a bit wet to try to get a shed in place on the back of a truck, but Malcolm from PCC is keen to get the water tank sorted soon.
If you are interested in participating in the community food forest garden project, please contact Jonathan at the Residents’ Association through the Contact Us page with your email address and/or a contact phone number, so we can keep a mailing/phone list of interested folks. For instance, one of the first things we need to figure out is the best way to facilitate discussion and coordinate resources and tasks between working bees, whether that be email, Facebook, this website, a wiki, smoke signals, or some other method.
Hi folks, it’s really happening! Let’s all catch up tomorrow at 10 am (see event details) and meet and greet. We have our garden plan (PDF) to work from, and we need to mark out where the things will go, who has access to what resources, and what we can get started with first.
Things to do
New gate and mulched grass.
The council have already mown and mulched the site for us, so that’s the first thing done from the list of tasks in the plan. Likely candidates for things we can start doing are:
Construct the composting station. There’s a nice easy way to build this out of used pallets.
Construct some initial allotment beds: 3-4 raised beds, 1.2 – 3 metres, over winter, ready for spring planting. Sleeper timbers or similar (driftwood?) required.
Minor earthworks, to cut 20-30 cm swale steps along contours in places. I think we’ll need a bobcat for this, or it’s a large amount of manual spade labour. We may be able to engage the council here.
Plant nursery trees (tagasaste, lavender) to improve the soil, fix nitrogen and shelter later tree plantings.
Plant some of the orchard tree species that are tolerant of wind and poor soil (feijoa, bamboo, apple varieties “Irish Peach” and “Priscilla”).
We are currently investigating the option to move one of the old shelter buildings from the closed Muri Station onto the site, to use as the potting/tool shed, and the council are willing to provide a water tank for garden and Civil Defence use.
Things to bring
Gumboots (required),
enthusiasm (required), and optionally:
measuring tape,
a spade,
pencil and paper,
any plants you’d like to donate; at this stage we only envisage planting Tagasaste (Cytisus proliferus), Lavender (Lavendula dentata), or Feijoa (Acca sellowiana), and
if someone could bring a drone so we can get a top-down photograph, that would be super-fantastic and help with mapping and plotting.
Good news! There is now sensible access along the Muri Station platform and a new gate into our new community garden / food forest area on Muri Reserve. The council have provided us with a mains water connection and have mown and mulched the grass on the site ready for planting.
New gate and mulched grass.
Improved access along the train platform.
We would like to run an opening and working bee this weekend. There’s plenty to do, and there is an initial list of jobs in our short term annual garden plan. Any and all donations of time, materials, tools or required professional services will be gratefully received.
Iif you are interested in participating please get in touch with the RA secretary via the Contact Us page!
It has been a while, perhaps too long; but although it may look like nothing has happened in the last year or two, your intrepid Residents’ Association has navigated a long and complex journey on your behalf, so that we can now, legally, finally, begin our planned community food forest!
Muri Reserve, with the community food forest site. Vehicle access from the end of Muri Road, along the station platform, across the ditch and to a gate in the fence, shown in yellow.
Porirua City Council are building vehicle access this month to the community food forest site on Muri Reserve. The access will go from the end of Muri Road, along the station platform, and across the ditch to a new gate in the fence, as shown in yellow on the map.
Getting the green light
To legally establish the community food forest, and to set it up to continue indefinitely as a community-stewarded project, required several things.
Firstly, we needed an organisation to take responsibility for stewarding the project, and maintaining its links to and engagement with the community. Initial discussions were around establishing a charitable trust, but the constitutional principles of the Residents’ Association to act and liaise on behalf of Pukerua Bay community projects was a natural fit.
Second, we needed a licence to garden on the Muri Reserve site from the Porirua City Council. Although this was more straightforward at the beginning, the process got a bit bogged down because of the Muri Reserve site boundary with the KiwiRail main trunk corridor. The licence was further complicated by the fact that the site is on reserve land, governed by The Reserves Act 1977, which requires more regulations and careful considerations of liability than would otherwise be the case. However, in June 2016, Te Komiti approved our application for the issuing of a licence for gardening, and this agreement has now been signed.
Thirdly, we needed to sign a scary-looking legal access agreement with KiwiRail for the vehicle access, which runs alongside the closed Muri Station platform. This arose from the gardening licence negotiations with council, and involved quite a lot of to-and-fro, and a good amount of persistence on our behalf from council staff. However this agreement is now signed and in place, and work to build the vehicle access will be commencing this month.
We also needed to lodge our shorter-term annual garden plan for the community food forest with the council parks department for approval, which is also happening this week. This is to ensure that we are adhering to local by-laws and so on, and not doing anything silly like planting convolvulus, or having a bonfire. (No, we can’t ever have bonfires on Muri Reserve land. Sorry.)
And finally, we needed to agree to pay public liability insurance. This is fairly standard nowadays unfortunately, due to changes in legislation around work safety, occupational health, ACC, local government liability and so on. The RA is now up for an annual insurance bill of a few hundred dollars a year to cover this, and would appreciate any fund-raising ideas or efforts from willing enthusiastic residents!
If you’re still reading this, well done; even more excruciating detail is available in the RA minutes, which you can browse here.
A one-day planning workshop was held at The Woolshed on 12 March 2016 to plan the first stages of setting up the Pukerua Bay Community Food Forest. Attendance was thinner than previous meetings, nevertheless we made a great deal of collective decisions and progress, and this was summarised into our document, Plan for Autumn-Winter 2016 (PDF). See also the Planting Guide (PDF) produced as the result of earlier research work and meetings.
Muri Reserve community food forest site
Many thanks to go to Richard Self for ably leading our workshop process, and for sharing his experiences with the Wellington Innermost Gardens community garden!
The Pukerua Bay Residents’ Association is conducting some community consultation about how Muri Reserve can be developed, and have published an online survey for residents to complete. If you have ideas about the community garden food forest, please complete the survey before the end of October, and let the Residents’ Association know your views!
