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SCES Annual Report 2009HERITAGE HARVEST FESTIVAL 28TH 29TH MARCHOur inaugural Heritage Harvest Festival celebrated the heritage fruits and vegetables that are being grown in gardens and orchards down south. Our own efforts in growing the old varieties have gone well and the Southland Seed Savers network (10 years old this year) is established throughout Southland. This has meant that there are growing numbers of gardeners with interesting and unusual edible things tucked away in sheltered spots in their gardens and we felt it was time to show the community just what it was we have all been nurturing. Everyone was invited to the Heritage Harvest Festival, and hundreds came. We hired two halls - one to display the heritage produce and one in which to hold the 32 workshops on how to turn it into pickles, jams, jellies and spirit-lifting ciders and meads as well as how to grow the traditional vegetables, save seeds from them, manage an orchard and keep bees, to mention just a few of the weekends activities. It was a great success. Gardeners we’d never met turned up to offer their wares for display and to sample and to see for themselves what others had brought. Some shyly offered a special variety of potato or tomato that they’d been growing every season for most of their adult lives, others unloaded gigantic vegetables they’d only tried growing for the first time this summer and had amazed even themselves by their success. There were tomatoes shaped like goat-udders, carrots the length of your arm, potato varieties thought long-lost and marrows the size of small caravans. The tables groaned under the weight of it all and everyone marveled, in a slightly envious kind of way, at the skill of certain gardeners and did what they could to extract the secrets of cultivation from them. The children of the district made models from vegetables; a cherry-tomato bird singing in a halved-orange cage, a banana-bodied dachshund, a purple-carrot Tyrannosaurus Rex with blood-red tomato pulp dripping from his jaws, a grey-pumpkin turtle, a carrot-winged potato-plane (with wheels that worked) and many, many more. It was a sight to see and plenty of Southlanders saw it. The weekend was great country fun and plenty of city folk came back to their roots for the two days of harvest festivities. We will be doing it again annually, by popular demand, so we’ll all have our fingers crossed for many more bumper harvests. Word will spread and no doubt extra seeds sown in preparation for what might become the biggest and most fun day on Southland’s gardening calendar. OPEN ORCHARD PROJECTOver the autumn: We have visited and gathered fruit from 35 old Southland orchards and have been sent fruit from a further 10 orchards. ( we think we have Southland covered!) Most of the orchards were planted from 1850 to 1910! These often abandoned orchards contain a treasure of old, diverse varieties and we have mapped them, photographed them and sampled them (cooked, baked and boiled) so we can select the best to reproduce and spread back around Southland. Some will be very rare and may no longer be anywhere else in the world so this project will be of international interest. We have the photos linked to our website and will add information as we can. We are grateful also for the extra support of the Sustainable Farming Fund who pay the petrol and buy root stocks for this project. We are focusing on apples this year and have 4 apples from 310 trees. There are a few double-ups but not as many as we expected. Researching their identification and origins will be a big job. Our data base uses 310 x 45 characteristics! We are looking at ways to attract funding from a sponsor for this time-consuming but important part of the project. It takes 3-4 hours to identify one of them through books and the internet! (One years full time research project!) When they can be identified, the name and origins of the variety are known, which makes them all the more valuable. Many came from Captain Howell via Australia, others are the best of the homelands of our early settlers- so we host the best of Scotland, Ireland or Europe. We have got people all over Southland wanting to replant these trees - Southland District Council’s township gardener is buying some and putting them back in the parks and reserves near where they came. E.g. Minnie Dean’s crab-apple in the Winton gardens, etc. More and more schools are buying heritage trees from us at near-cost to establish school orchards. It is very encouraging to have such positive interest already. In Winter we returned to the orchards and gathered scion wood, labeled them and cool-stored them. Our project, mainly through our website, has attracted interest from all over NZ. We had many requests for scion wood so others can graft their own heritage trees from all over Southland and NZ. Some provinces have none of their own left. We sent 450 scions around Southland and over 350 scions all over the remainder of NZ. The biggest order was from Canterbury ‘Men of the Trees’ who had been operating for 20 years and were ashamed that they had let most of their own heritage fruit trees die out. In spring we held grafting ‘working bees’ and grafted 620 trees (two of each). In spite of our atrocious spring weather, 290 varieties were saved. Only 20 trees will have to be re-visited next year. These baby apple trees will need a temporary base for 3-5 years until we have selected the best 50 Heritage Apples for Southland. Three of our most dedicated grafters. All the grafters cut their finger at least once! We are applying to Crops for Southland this week to see if they will host these trees, as it is a Southland project and has outgrown our own backyards. We did several pruning and grafting workshops all over Southland late winter and early spring. We made sure we got to Te Anau twice, as they missed out last year. The ages we taught ranged from 10 to 80! The result; 150 heritage apple trees grafted and taken home by participants. We bought and sold 500 heritage fruit trees as a fundraiser for our project We are advertising throughout Southland that we have a wonderful slide show presentation of this project. The romance of those early settlers and the orchards they planted is a special part of our heritage and history. The more we get into it the more we feel it is worthwhile. The special stories and personalities that go with the orchards are as much of a treasure as the trees. Maybe we could do a presentation for your committee? In Summer we will gather samples of early apples and will gather nectarines, pears and plums for stage Two! CHILDRENS EDUCATION:
A quote from one of our newsletters: ‘Hauroko school Visit When this country school visited the Environment Centre to learn more about composting and food forests we were delighted to find the students knew so much already and were filled with more advanced questions about what, when and why. It gives us faith that this new generation will be the ones who will really be able to make good decisions in the future with the health of the earth in mind. It appears they are already convincing their teachers and parents to make positive proactive changes.’
175 children went home with a garden in a bucket during the last school holidays. We taught the children the basics of gardening and how to care for their vegetable plants. Hopefully this will lead to an interest in gardening for them and their families. It was very rewarding to see children walking home with buckets gardens down every side road as we left the towns! One of the cutest comments was a small boy at Mataura who thought the carrot seeds looked like head lice. At Ohai the children often didn’t want to make a bucket garden but their parents made sure they did! Children from Mataura ready to go home! CENTRE BUSIER BY THE WEEK
NATIONAL CONTRIBUTIONSHosting National Visitors: For talks, workshops, information exchange: The Walk for the Planet team spent a day at Riverton, visiting the Centre and the Food Forest. Founder and now head lecturer of the Biological Husbandry Unit at Lincoln University, Bob Crowder stayed at Riverton for two days with members of our committee.. His comments about the progress made here and the facility we have established were very encouraging and he even invited one of our members to accept a role at the BH unit at Lincoln. The Green Peace fundraising team visited each day they were down and spoke to interested groups. Nelson Lebo Environmental Education award winner (USA) came and ran workshops and held three presentations over a weekend. One was about an ECO College they are planning to develop in South America on the lines of our proposed ECO Academy at Riverton. We will keep in touch with them to get ideas for our project. Jo and Brian Parscel , National ECO Show organisers and Permaculture teachers from Taupo stayed for 3 days. They have been to every environment Centre in NZ and to many in Australia and their verdict we are the best they have seen and would like us to do a speaking tour of the North Island sharing what we are doing down here! Networking Further Afield Members of our committee and society have represented us in various parts of the country (as far away as Hawkes Bay). The Permaculture Hui held this year in the North Island was a good venue for describing the progress we have made on a number of initiatives and our own Permaculture exponent, Adam, was very well received there, as evidenced by his being contracted to teach at subsequent workshops while in the area. Southland and Riverton in particular has enjoyed an increasingly high profile from being featured each month in the New Zealand Gardener magazine and their HomeGrown ‘Fruit Trees’ supplementary. We are now represented in a regular column in the Organic New Zealand magazine, where our Harvest Festival won a double page spread, thanks to our chairman, Robert Guyton’s writing skills! The Centre played a pivotal role too, in the Hampden Apple Day, where we mounted a large display of heritage apple varieties as a centre piece for their festival. We spoke to two separate audiences about the Southland project and showed the ‘Welcome to the Food Forest’ film that was made here in Riverton by University of Otago Students, featuring the progress of a local permaculture property over the past 18 years. All of these presentations were enthusiastically received. National Radio interviewer Sage Forest came and did lots of recording with us while we grafted our fruit trees and discussed our heritage orchard programme for National Radio’s spectrum programme which will be aired over the summer. TV ONE- Te Radar – a quote from our Newsletter ‘If you are a fan of TV1’s Te Radar, the fellow living in a caravan and learning to live ‘off the land’, you will be able to look forward to Riverton appearing in his next series ‘Radars Patch’. The wind howled down Riverton’s main street as the camera crew began filming – an interview with Adam Guyton on seed saving in the Environment Centre fared little better with the skylight and chimney rattling intermittently. Floundering on the North beach with our patron Malcolm McKenzie that evening was also blustery. Radar slept that night in Adam’s bedroom, the loft above his families garage amongst the trays and bags, baskets and sacks of seeds, getting a closer look at how southern seed saving gardeners live. Adam slept inside the house, for a change. Then against all odds and predictions the new day was a gem; sunny, windless and warm. Radar apparently got sunburnt! So the filming in the Guyton’s 15 year old Food Forest showed it to be the paradise that it is. Hopefully the filming of the programme will encourage more Kiwis to garden more naturally using heritage fruit, berries and vegetables. The programme will air on TV One in autumn.’ The South Coast Environment Centre with its associated projects and people has become established firmly as the ‘platform’ for education for sustainability in the south and we are constantly reminded of that by people from outside of the region. Te Radar with his host the Guyton’s ELLERSLIE FLOWER SHOW Robert was invited by ‘New Zealand Gardener’ to speak at the flower show in Christchurch as part of their speakers series. One of the topics they wanted was our Southland Open Orchard Project. We were proud to be able share our project and what we are achieving with people from all over NZ. Hopefully we have inspired other provinces to follow suit and get those lovely old heritage fruit trees back into schools, backyards and roadsides. OTHER HIGHLIGHTS from the groups we host and support:Organic Farm NZ - is an organic certification system for smaller growers and producers. This is a cheaper way to go when selling for the NZ Market only and is working successfully in other provinces. Andy Barrett from Otago OFNZ came down to Southland to speak to interested people last year and held a workshop in Autumn and in Spring the first pod of growers formed. These will be the first OFNZ certified growers in Southland and hopefully lead the way for more. SOUTHLAND SEED SAVERS is 10 years old! Ten years ago Henry Harrington called into our Environment Centre with his huge collection of seeds. He hoped we would be the Southland base for a seed network, so that all the varieties could be kept going for the next generations. Thus the ‘Southland Seed Savers Network’ was born. Henry has been a mentor and guide ever since, teaching the art of seed saving to all who were willing to learn. Thanks to Henry we have gone from strength to strength and now have a large team of seed savers involved insuring the living collection will be here for a few more generations. Organic groups 20 years old this year 20 years ago we invited the Riverton Community to come and hear Perry Spiller speak (He was the president of the Soil and Health Association of NZ). To attract him out here we had told him that we had a 'group' in Riverton; counting those we knew might be interested on one hand! When he unexpectedly said 'yes' we advertised widely hoping to get a few more! He had spoken to Invercargill the night before to 26 people. When he arrived he was as surprised as we were to find 54 people crammed into the Primary School library- he effervesced about what a fantastic group we had here and after his great presentation most people were more than happy to be part of the very new 'Riverton Organic Group'! Monthly meetings followed and the older more experienced gardeners sharing their gardens and their skills with the young and keen- and organic vege gardening thrived in every corner of Riverton. Now those young ones in 1989 are now 'the oldies' and we welcome new gardeners to come and join us to learn about organic gardening through our meetings, workshops and garden visits. Over the last 20 years more eco friendly groups were formed and now the South Coast Environment Centre is widely known around Southland and NZ as a great resource for more than just organic gardening. Marijke Aalders Founding member of Riverton Organic Growers is ‘Southland Gardener of the Year!’ Main Street banners The Riverton Estuary Care Society, Inc. in co-operation with Aparima College have produced a series or professionally printed banners on the theme of the Estuary, to hang along the main street of Riverton over the holiday period. Students from the high school, under the guidance of the society’s chairman, designed and produced images that reflected the resources of the Jacob’s River Estuary, before having them professionally made into tough, nylon flags. They were introduced to the public at an official opening at the Riverton Arts Centre and featured in an article in the Southland Times. The Society contributed $3 000 to the project and believe they got very good value for their money. The banners will serve to advertise Riverton and the estuary on many occasions in the future. Rural Heritage Day – In spite of gale-force winds making us abandon our own tent, we presented eight photo boards portraying Southland’s Heritage orchards and fruit, how to gather scions and graft fruit trees and explaining our open orchard project. They are presently in our window display. Beach 350 A delegation from the Centre made a splash at the Invercargill Transition Town-organised event at Oreti beach to highlight the issue of Climate Change, by pitching a large canvas tent nearby to the high tide and providing a graphic illustration of the effects of rising sea-levels. A photograph taken at the moment of destruction featured in the Southland Times the next day. In Transition The premier of the “In Transition” movie was screened last month in the Southland Museum and Art Gallery. This was an interesting movie showing how many communities around the world are adapting to a future with less oil and the expected challenges of climate change. Afterwards a panel of Southland leaders were invited to share their views. The mayors of the Southland District Council and Gore were on the panel along with a Venture Southland Rep and the Guyton’s from the South Coast Environment Centre. A good turn out to the event showed there was a strong interest in Southland for the kinds of developments ‘Transition Towns’ offers; greater communications between groups, food and materials produced locally etc. Riverton is portrayed as the most developed community in Southland on these lines with its eco groups covering many of the Transition Town characteristics. Southland overall looks in a good position to adapt to the challenges having mayors with such open minded approach to the issues. Veges for Free Lindsay Waldron from Invercargill had a problem- he grew more veges than his family could use- so he had an idea he would like to give them away to anyone willing to learn about starting their own garden. So he invited Robert Guyton well known for writing for the NZ gardener to come along with a square metre garden display and share some skills. Robyn made a great info sheet to give people first steps information to start a garden. The weather was perfect on Sunday 3rd May and the meeting spot was on a corner of a reserve in South Invercargill. Lindsey and his wife pulled up with a trailer full of veges and others arrived with more contributions. People came and lingered and talked from 12.30-3pm and everyone went home with a much appreciated bag of home grown veges. Other gardeners came and offered to give lessons and be mentors and three ladies are keen to start up a community garden. A resounding success and next year others have offered to put in some extra veges to give away and there is talk of displays and demonstrations to make it a very festive and informative annual event. Thanks Lindsey for your generosity it was a wonderful idea. Winding up after a successful day… Coming Up 1010
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