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The First Year of the Edible Village Project

The first year of the Maungaturoto Edible Village Project follows the natural rhythm of the seasons.

Across four seasonal workshops, participants explored edible and medicinal plants, learned practical skills, and deepened their connection to the environment around them.

Each gathering brought new discoveries, new relationships, and new knowledge.

Below you can follow the journey through a series of short films documenting the experiences of the people involved.

Workshop One – Autumn

19th October 2025: Fast Track Your Food Forest - Part Three

This was the big day! We were installing our very own food frost at the Maungaturoto Country Club. We’d put a call out to t he community and were inundated with hundreds of plants!

A friendly farmer had ripped up the rows for us the week before but it had been wet and muddy (the tractor got stuck!) and the paddock was looking a bit of a sorry sight! But with many helping hands and some hard-work enthusiasm we got the rows ready for planting.

And then came the really fun bit where we got to put the plants in the ground. We had 5 rows – one for Banna Grass, two for Tithonia (both of these rows for chop & drop biomass) and the 2 rows of edibles. We first planted the fruit trees and then the many, many support species. By the end we had a lovely baby food forest and were very grateful to be fed a delicious lunch by our ever-reliable cook, Elizabeth.

Workshop Two – Winter

4th October 2025: Citrus Planting at the Good News Church

This was a lovely working bee of adults & kids pulling together to plant a row of 10 citrus trees along the new fence beside the Good News Church. Not only will fruit from these trees be available for those walking along the footpath to pick, but they will also be used to fill the food boxes as part of the Church’s Food Bank. Yum!

Workshop Three – Spring

Gr13th September 2025: Bickerstaffe Road Planting

This footpath runs behind the Centennial Hall down to Bickerstaffe Road and is a well used route by school students and dog walkers. With that in mind we planted a collection of 10 yummy fruit trees that will be able to be enjoyed by passers by!

Workshop Four – Summer

21st September 2025: Fast Track Your Food Forest - Part Two

The second of our Food Forest workshops (again led by James Andrews, James Samuel & Arthur McInnes) was held at an already established food forest in Mangawhai. The food

forest here had been planted in an old avocado orchard and was perfectly overgrown enough for the three facilitators to demonstrate how to chop & drop support species whilst maintaining the strata for the edibles. We had a lot of fun with machetes and everyone went home with plenty of support species plants.

Workshop five

13th September 2025: Compost Workshop at the Centennial Hall

This workshop was led by Margie Baker from Sustainable Kaipara. Margie led us through the principles of composting and different systems that are used to break down food scraps. We then went out and had a practical demonstration at the MEVP Orchard.

Workshop six

12th September 2025: Otamatea Planting at the MCC

The second of our Food Forest workshops (again led by James Andrews, James Samuel & Arthur McInnes) was held at an already established food forest in Mangawhai. The foodOn a blustery wet September day a group of year 12 students came to the MCC to plant trees with me. This was the final part of their Tuakana journey through the Graeme Dingle Foundation’s Nga Ara Whetu-Career Navigator Programme that runs at Otamatea High School. As their Legacy Project, the students were able to choose what fruit trees they would like to plant. “This is a great ????? They said.

I’ll have to find out what she said!

Workshop seven

24th August 2025: Fast Track Your Food Forest - Part One

This was the first in a series of 3 workshops led by James Andrews, James Samuels and Arthur McInnes from Twin Falls Nursery. James A used a Holistic Decision Making framework to walk us through the What? Why? and How? of our workshop and then the three of them led us through the principles of Syntropic Agroforestry and how to design a Food Forest. We then went outside to the paddock to look at our site and plan our Food Forest!

Workshop Eight

3rd August 2025: Maungaturoto Working Bee

This was a great Working Bee, coinciding with the Gaidhealtachd’s Midwinter Gathering (the Gaidhealtachd is New Zealand’s Celtic Summer School) at the Maungaturoto Country Club. We tidied up some previously planted, but subsequently neglected and overgrown fruit trees, and we created a corner orchard in the paddock behind the cottage, full of plum and citrus trees. We used a mountain of cardboard and mulch to suppress the kikuyu around the trees.

Workshop nine

28th June 2025: Centennial Hall Orchard Planting

This was our first big community Working Bee, where we created an orchard around the Centennial Hall.

25 people turned up to help on the day. Some only for a much-appreciated wheelbarrow-pushing hour, some stalwart people plodded and planted and pushed and shovelled for the whole Working Bee. Everyone was very welcome, very helpful and an integral and wonderful part of creating this legacy in our wonderful community.

We started off with a blank canvas of mowed kikuyu grass full of holes that had been dug by the lovely Sam Hodgetts with his digger the day before. And we were so grateful for those holes! It meant we could just pop the fruit trees in and no heavy digging! Yay!

The first job was to plant the trees and then the next task was to lay on cardboard to smother the kikiuyu. We had a massive mountain of cardboard craziness dumped outside the Centennial Hall and it looked like there would be no way that we could possibly use it all, but we did! Every box, and piece of packaging was utilised and layered over the kikuyu around the trees.

Next came sileage around each tree, gratefully donated by a local farmer. The sileage was placed in a circle, forming the shape of a wee garden around each tree. On top of this came Grandpa’s Garden Mix from Kaipara Landscapes and then last, but by no means least, came some gorgeous dark mulch that KDC had kindly donated. This mulch is the residue from the cyclone-felled trees over in Mangawhai and it’s wonderful to see their sad demise put to good, fruitful use. And in that nest of goodness we planted a whole range of support plants; comfrey, yarrow, herbs, etc.

In between all these tree circles (or guilds as they are called in Permaculture talk) we layered wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of pale coloured post peel, forming a network of pathways weaving between the fruit trees.

It was, at times, a hard slog in the muddy showers, but we were so grateful for every sparkle of sunshine and every new person who rocked up with renewed energy and vigour to push a wheelbarrow or cart a bucket of mulch. We were all kept well fed and nourished by Elizabeth’s delicious cooking and the whole Working Bee was documented by the talented Sam Kemp.