Community gardens squeezed into areas of high density building are helping residents connect with each other, soothing their souls, and feeding them in a time when a supermarket shop is breaking the bank.
Catalina Community Garden committee members Trish Best (left) and Sharon Dixon. Photo: The Detail / Tom Kitchin
Big city living in New Zealand increasingly means getting used to apartments, townhouses, and losing the backyard.
The solution to the housing crisis has meant there's often no room for a vege patch. But with the price of food soaring, more and more people are looking for another way to make up for a supermarket budget shortfall.
Enter, community gardens – on common ground, specially laid out side-yards, rooftops and wherever there's a spare bit of dirt.
On today's episode of The Detail, Tom Kitchin visits two gardens in Tāmaki Makaurau, one in the central city and the other in a young, intensively-developed suburb.
The first is Homeground, run by the Auckland City Mission and plonked among the skyscrapers in the CBD. It's run by the Auckland City Mission: a one-stop-shop for health and social services, catering to the city's most vulnerable people.
The nine-storey building has a health centre, a pharmacy, a community dining room, specialist detox services and apartments.
And on the roof, it has a garden.
Homeground resident Shirleen (left) and the Auckland City Mission's supportive housing manager Nic Bowden planting vegetables at the centre's rooftop garden. Photo: The Detail / Tom Kitchin
The Mission's supportive housing manager Nic Bowden and resident Shirleen give The Detail a tour of the garden, where we see everything from coffee plants to five-metre-high banana trees.
Lettuces growing at Homeground's rooftop garden. Photo: The Detail / Tom Kitchin
"The opportunity and the challenge we had around the high-density apartment style living was how do we still stay connected with what's so important to us: the environment, the whenua, the kai," Bowden tells The Detail.
"In the design phase and the process around the apartments, of course it was only natural that we would incorporate a garden and te māra kai (gardening for food) somehow, and I think having that community space really opens a platform for people to share their skills... there's that whakawhanaungatanga – building relationships, getting to know each other."
"The cost of living is just horrendous," resident Shirleen says. "So what I want to do is eat out of our garden by Christmas time ... we've got tomatoes, we've got everything available and good kai for us to eat.
"Just even buying silverbeet is quite expensive these days. I recommend growing a garden ... if you put your heart and soul into it, you'll see what's at the end of it, because I know it takes a bit of time and effort to do a garden but your rewards are there."
Next, The Detail goes to Hobsonville Point in West Auckland, a suburb built on the site of a former air force base from 2011.
Until 1967, it was the headquarters for flying boats, and remnants of that history are reflected in some of the street names – and the Catalina Community Garden.
The garden has nearly 30 private plots residents can rent and plant their own vegetables, fruit and flowers.
''A lot of the houses have very little space because they're so close together," local gardener Trish Best says.
The Catalina Community Garden in Hobsonville Point was founded a decade ago. Photo: The Detail / Tom Kitchin
"There's often a sun issue. You don't get enough sun to actually grow anything. There's a lot of apartments where there's no room outside.
"The high density really lends itself to getting to know your neighbours in your blocks and community gardens is another way of just meeting people," Sharon Dixon says.
It's also a bit of a community hub.
"You often meet up with people and you just chat about what you are growing," Best says.
"There's a lot of communication ... people in the summertime will often come here after work and just cruise by and stop and chill out and perhaps sit down and have a beer."
Correction: In the podcast, Gardens4Health is incorrectly described as an initiative from the Disabilities Association. It is part of Diabetes Foundation Aotearoa.
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