community garden

Community Garden & Food Forest Spring Festival

Join us for a family friendly fun day at the Community Garden & Food Forest, off the platform of the former Muri Station at the end of Muri Road.

Where: Pukerua Bay Community Garden & Food Forest, Muri Road (map)
When: 10am – 12 noon, Saturday 23 September, 2023 (ical)

Garden pruning and tool care workshop

Hi Gardeners,
The Pukerua Bay Community Garden and Food Forest team presents:

Pruning and Tool Care Workshop
Join us on SATURDAY AUGUST 13th, 10am – 12 noon.
PRUNING
Hannah Swartz will be demonstrating winter pruning care for our fruit trees.
Thanks to NZ Organic Garden magazine for their donation to host this event.
TOOLS
Hannah will also talk about care and maintenance of your garden tools. We are lucky to have two local experts that will help you with any of your tools you bring along. We are asking for a Koha to the garden for this service.
FOR SALE
Our seeds will be available for you to purchase (with cash).
As always, everyone is welcome and we look forward to seeing you in the garden. (Weather permitting!)

Community Garden Food Forest working bee

We’ll be at the Community Garden and Food Forest this Saturday 12 June at 10am to 12 noon (ish). Feel free to come along as we’ll be working on the berry area and usual maintenance, plus the usual cups of tea from the thermette. If available, you can bring:
  • Gloves and hand tools
  • Green matter for the compost bins (e.g. veg scraps)
We now have two regular mornings in the garden:
  • 2nd Saturday of the month
  • Last Wednesday of the month

We look forward to catching up with you soon,
PKB Community Garden & Food Forest members

Community Garden consultation

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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.

Community garden meeting

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. Everyone in the community is invited to contribute to the planning for the immediate and longer term future.

Community food forest garden working bee

To celebrate Her Royal Majesty’s birthday, let’s build a compost station and some raised beds after lunch on Monday.  If possible we can get a few tree and nursery species in the ground too. See the post for further details.

Allotment beds at Innermost Gardens, Wellington.

Community Food Forest update: vehicle access!

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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.