garden.geek.nz

Thank you Jesse Mulligan for mentioning Garden.Geek.NZ on the Auckland Drive radio show. Here are some more resources on foraging for kai in Aotearoa.

At right is the collaborative New Zealand food and fruit sharing map New Zealand Fruit and Food Share Map (view larger) highlighting fruit and nut trees, and other natural urban food sources. You can add listings and details for things you find out in the world.

Freedom Fruit Gardens is an exciting project that aims to plant edible gardens through New Zealand for for communities to harvest and enjoy instigated by artist A.D. Scierning. The inaugural planting takes place Friday, June 25, 2010 in East Otara, Auckland in conjunction with Te Tuhi centre for the arts, and future installments are planned for Wellington and Christchurch. A proposal for the Wellington Freedom Fruit Garden will be exhibited at the New Dowse on June 19, 2010.

Another abundant and easily overlooked food to forage is the delicious and nutritious seaweed decorating our coastlines, the “treasure of the tides.” One type, karengo (porphyra) is a delicacy closely related to Japanese nori and Welsh laver and considered a taonga by Maori. In New Zealand, it may be gathered in the wild for personal use. See Scoop’s “Would you like seaweed with that?” article for more details and Pacific Harvest for recipes and cooking tips.

Wild Picnic, a gallery of edible and useful wild plants found in Wellington, serves up some tips for safe foraging:
• 1. If in doubt, don’t eat it.
• 2. Avoid foraging from roadsides and polluted places.
• 3. Avoid areas that may have recently been sprayed.
• 4. Get permission before foraging on someone else’s property.
• 5. Get to know NZ’s poisonous plants so you can know what to avoid.
• 6. Harvest sustainably.

Other sites of interest:

• Edible Wellington – A Gatherer’s Guide (Collaborative Map)
• Otautahi Urban Foraging Seeking out kai and more in Christchurch
• forage.rs public beta global collaborative foraging map
• GreenUrbanLiving.co.nz Wild Foods

Useful books:

• Common Seaweeds of New Zealand by Nancy Adams
• A Field Guide to the Native Edible Plants of New Zealand by Andrew Crowe

What are your favorite foraging sites and tips?

This week marks the anniversary of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, one of my favorite books as a child. But one glance at the protagonist’s varied diet (food diary lovingly compiled by the Shrinking Sisters) reveals that it is not Pieris rapae rapae (aka cabbage white butterfly, small white butterfly or just white butterfly), Seagarden’s frequent diner.

These soft green consumers grow up and become white butterflies, who then lay their eggs on the underside of the leaves. The caterpillars hatch and begin to feast on a menu of organic tatsoi, kale, bok choy, broccoli and brussels sprouts, i.e. the brassicaceae — in the case of the tatsoi (below), until it’s entirely devoured.

In the organic garden, the main options for stopping this cycle are physical (removing the caterpillars and eggs), chemical (garlic spray as a preventative), and biological (Bacillus thuringiensis aka BT, dipel and thuricide which is a bacterial stomach poison for all caterpillars).

I regularly apply garlic spray, which I suspect the caterpillars enjoy as a tasty marinade, and my strategic companion plantings of hyssop, nasturtium, calendula and cosmos have been interpreted as gifts of affectionate bouquets. A box of BT (in the form of Organic NO Caterpillars) sits on the shelf, but after buying it I found I really don’t have a strong desire to poison the little beings. I guess I value biodiversity more than a perfect crop. (See Dan Barber’s inspiring TED talk featuring systems-thinking measurements of success, such as the the health of the predators and water purified through the farming process.)

I handpick them in the mornings. And sometimes in the evenings. They rotate their fuzzy faces towards mine and channel Mary Oliver, mouthing “Don’t bother me.
I’ve just been born.” Once I’ve gathered a handful or so, I fling them gently over the fence, into the puka (or beyond). I won’t be replanting tatsoi. How do you deal with very hungry caterpillars?

What do we learn about food in school? Not much!

But I always learn something useful from Michael Pollan, here on Democracy Now, discussing the link between healthcare and diet, the dangers of processed foods, the power of the meat industry lobby, the “nutritional-industrial complex,” the impact industrial agriculture has on global warming, and his sixty-four rules for eating from “Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual”:

Watching the Jamie Oliver hold up a tomato in front of a classroom of kids who were not able to identify hits in a visceral emotional way. As winner of the 2010 TED Prize his wish is to teach every child about food and empower them against obesity:

(See also Mark Bittman’s talk on What’s wrong with what we eat from 2009 EG conference.)

Here are some things I’ve learned from the garden this week:
• Celery: I harvested some celery by completely removing the plant and cut other stalks off at the soil level so I’d know where to put in some new plants. Those that were cut are shooting up new stalks.
• Of all the plants I expected to be devoured as they are growing up, the broccoli and brussels sprouts would have been last on my list. I imagined the sulfur-containing compounds that make them so healthy for us would be naturally repellent to most insects. Oh how wrong I was — they are being eaten alive by caterpillars (cleverly colored exactly the same green as the leaves) and now attracting what looks like black scale insects at the base. I’ve been using an organic garlic spray along with manually picking off the offenders when I see them.

Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray have set out to start a window farms craze in NYC. They are creating several different designs for suspended, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield light-augmented window farms using low-impact or recycled local materials. They are calling for participants to build a window farm and grow your own food at home in a collaborative design project.http://windowfarms.org/

This project fits within a larger context of their collaborative work: “crowdsourced R&Diy solutions for environmental issues. Our inspiration for community involvement derives from concepts of local production (think of the coming network of 3D multi-material printers), mass customization, and crowdsourcing. We envision the DIY aspect, not as a nostalgia-inducing hobby or a compromise during hard financial times, but as a futuristic infrastructure-light alternative to big R&D. Instead of waiting for products and services to be developed by industry, local social networks develop solutions for themselves by dividing scientists’ breakthrough findings into actionable local steps.”

Crowdsourcing local solutions to environmental problems. Wikis and instructables aren’t enough – develop tools to help people build on what other have started.