The community garden and Fruit & Vege Co-op at St Matthew’s in Titahi Bay
Story and photos contributed by Casey Lee.
As you go past the unassuming church of St Matthew’s Anglican Church in Titahi Bay, you might notice the neat garden beds that line one side of the walkway to the church. Walking a bit further to the side of the hall, you will find some 20 feijoa trees. This is the Titahi Bay Community Garden @ St Matthew’s (TBCG@SM), a community garden run by the Titahi Bay community hosted at St Matthew’s grounds. The project was initiated in 2019 by the then Priests-in-charge Rev. Casey Lee and Rev. Carmen Yeoh.
Vegetable beds beside the walkway to the church
The TBCG@SM is based on principles of social reciprocity - the local community can benefit from their involvement in social community activities and they can also reap the harvest of the fruits of their own labour. With the cooperation of other like-minded organisations in Titahi Bay, the TBCG@SM was launched in June 2019 with the Regional Public Health as the lead sponsor. Other charitable organisations came on board too to support the starting of the TBCG@SM.
The TBCG@SM aims not only to provide the space for the community to gather, but to also inform and teach participants the necessary skills so that anyone can grow food in their own garden. Free herb and vegetable seedlings were given to those interested to plant them in their own homes. A community workshop in composting and compost bin-making was held. And other similar workshops are in the pipeline.
A tour of the vegetable garden
Table-height and wheelchair accessible vegetable beds
There are currently eight raised vegetable beds and two table height vegetable beds. The table height vegetable beds were designed for seniors who might find it harder to bend and are also wheelchair accessible.
One of the vegetable beds are reserved for common herbs – mint, coriander, parsley, sage, oregano, rosemary – enabling people to take what they need when they need it, instead of buying a bunch from the shop.
Native vegetable and plants are grown in another bed to encourage people to recognise edible native plants and to learn foraging skills. Currently growing in this vegetable bed are NZ spinach (tetragonia tetragonioides), puha (sonchus kirkii), kawakawa (macropiper excelsum) and nasturtium. There are also some blackberries bushes just over the fence at the edge of the ground.
The fruit orchard now has 20 feijoa trees, 5 lemon trees and 3 apple trees with room for more fruits trees.
We currently have compost bins for the green waste from the community garden and also from the fruits & vege co-op packing (see below), and our lawn clippings. Some community members also bring kitchen scraps to the church compost bins. We have yet to make the compost bins available to the community at large as we feel more education is still needed to ensure people are putting the right things into the compost bins.
Work is currently in progress to install a 15,000-litre rainwater collection tank, to be situated beside the downpipe of the church hall - with the rainwater being used for irrigating the vegetables beds. There will also be a rainwater tap for general water usage.
Other future plans for the community garden include the construction of a (3x4m) open-sided pavilion for volunteers to gather and connect with each other. This pavilion will also house the pantry cupboard, where people in the community can drop off their excess produce from their own garden to share with others.
Community involvement
A core group of volunteers work on the community garden every Tuesday (concurrent with the Fruit & Vege Coop collection day) and also on Saturday afternoons – from 2.30pm on.
The plantings on the vegetable beds are planned – and anyone can come and participate in the planting, watering or weeding of the beds.
Likewise, anyone can come any time to harvest. Little signs are placed on appropriate beds that say “These are ready for harvest” to encourage people to join in the harvesting. Also people are asked to harvest only the outer leaves of silverbeet, lettuce, spinach, bok choy, spring onion etc. leaving the plants there for others to also harvest some leaves and allowing the plan to produce more leaves.
Titahi Bay Fruit & Vege Co-op (TBV)
Some five years ago, St Matthew’s Titahi Bay became the host/hub for the packing and distribution of the north-eastern sector of the Greater Wellington Fruit & Vege Co-op, a joint initiative of the Regional Public Health (RPH) and Wesley Community Action (WCA). The initiative aims to provide affordable fruits and vegetables to the community.
So how does it work?
People who are interested sign up to join the co-op. They place their order at least one week in advance and they can order as many packs as they like. There is no commitment to order every week. Every week, prepaid orders are then sent to the Fruit and Vegetable Coordinator who purchases bulk supplies of healthy seasonal fruit and vegetables. The produce is delivered the following Tuesday to the packing hubs. The volunteers help sort and pack the orders into $12 packs ready for pickup or to be delivered to the distribution hubs. The volunteers consists mostly of people from the congregations and others from the local neighbourhood. St Matthews in Titahi Bay is the local collection site for vegetable packs and volunteers also deliver the vegetable packs in bulk to Collection Centres in Pukerua Bay, Plimmerton, Porirua, Tawa and Newlands - so that people can collect vegetable packs from their local collection centre. “It’s grown into a really special caring community. People love to lend a helping hand,” said Casey. Anecdotally, the volunteers and co-op members have attested to the co-op contributing to a great sense of community, supporting healthier food choices and providing food security to the co-op members.
TBV was the first packing hub to move away from using plastic bags to using brown paper bags to pack fruit and vegetable for their co-op members. TBV also makes their own small produce paper bag using old newspapers - these are used to pack dry loose produce such as potatoes, kumara, onions and carrots into 1kg bags.
After about a year of trialing the use of paper bags, we found that the paper bags were not as suitable for packing of fresh wet vegetables, and eventually TBV started using reusable cloth bags. Co-op members are asked to return their cloth bags the following week so that they can be re-used.
With financial help from Regional Public Health, TBV started a trial in mid-2020 where sorting and packing are done into reusable plastic tubs and then co-op members bring their own shopping bags to take away the produce.
Teaching Other Skills
Cooking sessions at the church
Sometimes co-op members find vegetables in their packs that they are unfamiliar with - both in terms of cooking and eating. Sometimes vegetables and produce go to waste because people are unsure what to do with the vegetables - how best to cook it. So with this in mind, with the involvement of dietitians from Regional Public Health, Health Living Cooking was launched in early 2018. It was later renamed to Real Good Kai. Two programmes are held per year, each programme comprising weekly sessions over a period of 5-7 weeks. The sessions cover introducing unfamiliar vegetables and what you can do with them, menu design to eliminate waste, how to use the various parts of a vegetable including scraps, and how to transform leftover meals into new dishes. The Real Good Kai sessions were also tailored for different target groups e.g. working people, single-parent, stay-at-home-mums, those with children.
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Rev Casey Lee and Rev Carmen Yeoh recently retired as the Co-Priests-in-charge of St Matthew’s but will continue to run the Community Garden and Vegetable Co-op on site.
For more information, check out the links below:
Titahi Bay Community Garden @ St Matthew’s