“When I would come back to New Zealand and see all the green everywhere, I couldn't believe it was real.”
Adrian would spend three out of four weeks in the Australian desert, coming home to his mother's house in Tolaga Bay every Christmas.
In 2016, he had a moment of realisation.
“I was pruning my mother's feijoa tree and I thought to myself ‘could this be a job? Could I garden for work?'
“She told me about how she was paying someone $60 to mow her lawns and how many customers they had. I was shocked. It made me realise I could make this into a job.”
Adrian had wanted to move back to Gisborne for a while — he went to Perth in 2009 — but he did not want to work in forestry.
He returned to Perth and promptly quit his job. His workmates asked ‘why are you going back to Gisborne? There's nothing there'.
He replied: “I'm going back to garden.”
“Everyone was so shocked when I said that.”
Adrian returned to Gisborne in 2016 and bought the tools he needed to start his own business.
He advertised in the Eastland Trader and The Gisborne Herald, looking for any sort of yard work.
Around the same time he decided to turn the lawn on his Kaiti property into a fruit and vegetable garden.
“Why do we have lawns? I'm not a cow, I can't eat grass,” he said.
He converted his backyard, the lawn along the side of his house, the front lawn and even the grass verge into fruit and vegetable patches, or varieties of fruitbearing trees.
After a couple of years he decided to set up social media accounts under the name One Minute Gardening. He was inspired partly out of frustration from watching videos online about gardening that would waste about a minute of the video with instrumentals and prompts to subscribe to their YouTube channels, then provide indepth information on gardening that was “too much to digest at once”.
He thought why not make short and simple videos.
“I wanted it to be easy to digest. I know I have a short attention span so I was sure others would, too,” he said.
“I can go more indepth about stuff but I don't want to be that guy. I just want to keep it simple.
“My whole idea is about introducing people to the idea of gardening. I want to appeal to the ones who are scared to try it.”
Adrian posted his first video in October 2018.
Today he has 3746 Instagram followers and 12,715 followers and 11,500 likes on his Facebook page.
Growing your own fresh, organic food has emotional and physical benefits, he says.
“It's relaxing. For me it feels like a mini-paradise.
“I miss it when I'm away during the day. I feel like I have a tangible connection to the land. More birds have been visiting, too.”
He removed trees around his property to build fences and while doing so people walking past would stop and stare in amazement and ask what was happening on his property.
“I usually have a row of tomatoes every year by the fence-line.”
He recalled before setting up One Minute Gardening, one particular guy telling him he would love to learn how to grow tomatoes.
“It was one of those moments where I felt I had to help these people get over their fear of failure.
“A lot of people just don't know how to grow kai. I wanted to help people with absolutely zero experience.
“Plant one tomato plant and start from there. Who knows? Maybe they might grow more.”
He has helped a few people in the community learn how to garden and they now have gardens similar to his.
“It's about teaching people simple things so they can grow in confidence.”
He also gardens by maramataka — the Maori lunar calendar — but “once again I keep it really simple”.
“I want to give people just enough information that if they find they have a passion for it they can take it further themselves.”
