Cost of living crisis: Western Bay trust delivering gardens for homegrown vegetables

A Te Puke-based health services provider is tackling the cost of living one garden bed at a time.

Poutiri Trust is helping households in the Western Bay of Plenty to start their own vegetable gardens by delivering kiwifruit bins, compost, topsoil and seedlings to them.

The initiative also helps tackle the cost-of-living crisis and allows whānau to reap nutritional health benefits. Since the end of last year, the trust has helped about 90 households.

A maara kai [food garden] facilitator regularly visits the households, giving them information about what vegetables to grow in certain weather conditions and how to prepare their gardens for bugs.

Poutiri Trust general manager Kirsty Maxwell-Crawford said the cost of living and housing had become "really expensive" and the initiative was about making kai more affordable and accessible.

"This was a homegrown solution that allows us to utilise local resources like kiwifruit bins."

The kiwifruit bins are 1.5 metres squared and are being used as gardens. Photo / Supplied

She said the initiative was about creating communities in terms of "sustainable healthy food sources".

"It's making it really easy to plant and maintain a healthy vegetable garden so people have got their own vegetable oil literally in their backyard rather than at Countdown or Pak'nSave."

For people new to gardening, it felt "psychologically doable" to look after the kiwifruit bin garden, which was about 1.5sq m. The bin was also "completely transportable" for people who were renting if they moved house.

"Hopefully when we finish this initiative ... we have hundreds of households that are actively gardening all year round and providing plenty of vegetables for themselves but also their neighbours, their whānau."

Maara kai [food garden] facilitator Paora Tuanau visits households regularly and advises them on how to best maintain the gardens. Photo / Supplied

As a health services provider, Maxwell-Crawford said finding innovative ways to improve access to healthy food was beneficial for nutritional and basic health needs.

"It influences things such as our oral health, but it also influences things such as prevention of diabetes and reducing the amount of sugar and processed foods.

"If we can be proactive and preventative in what we're doing, then this also helps us all in the primary care community health space."

Maxwell-Crawford said the idea was born from a hauora [health] day in Ōtamarākau last year when a kuia [elderly Māori woman] said gardening had become difficult and she would love "a raised garden".

"Tamariki love it because it's at their height. Kaumatua and kuia - [the] elderly also like it because they don't have to bend down so far."

Maxwell-Crawford said any spare produce could be given to the trust's pātaka [open pantry] so it was also an opportunity to "give back".

Poutiri Trust maara kai facilitator Paora Tuanau visited households regularly and provided education about maintaining the gardens and where to find information online.

"Everything's too expensive nowadays - families and even individuals need to learn how to actually grow something for their own health, to be able to eat ... that's what I'm seeing in the young mamas and young dads - they're right into it."

Tuanau also posted online a cooking video after using vegetables from his own maara kai for a meal.

"I picked vegetables out of it, took it into the kitchen and started making spring rolls out of it."