GOING WITH THE GRAIN
RENOWNED SEED-SAVER, AUTHOR AND ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCATE KAY BAXTER (67) HAS BEEN AN ORGANIC GARDENER FOR NEARLY 40 YEARS AND IS A CO-FOUNDER OF THE KˉOANGA INSTITUTE
Kay’s growing a good life
Irarely buy basic food at the supermarket, and I can’t remember the last time sat in a doctor’s office…
20 or 30 years ago maybe?
When I was much younger, my health wasn’t good. I had most of my thyroid taken out, cancer twice, all of my teeth out and other health issues.
I had all these things wrong with me but knew the doctors weren’t trained in nutrition, so I wasn’t going to find answers with them. I’ve since spent my whole adult life researching what makes a healthy person. It seemed like the obvious place to begin was to grow and eat organic produce − the less poisons, the better.
Part of my journey was to come into contact with the work of Dr Weston Price, who found that all the indigenous people he visited in the 1930s followed the same principles in their diets and were super healthy.
I totally got that to be healthy humans must eat a nutrientdense diet. I learned that health is dependent on both genetics and the environment, so healthy food relies upon good seeds as well as good soil.
Having highly mineralised and microbially active soil is just the start with veges and fruit, and with animal products too. Milk and eggs won’t be high quality unless the animals are eating high-quality pasture.
The earth is where it all begins. No-one can deny that the way we’re living is de-generating everything – the health of our soil, our human health, animal health, ecological health. We must learn to see Mother Earth as a sacred, alive being, and also acknowledge that our lives depend on us taking care of her.
A peach tree was what got me really serious about saving old fruit trees and starting a nursery. At the time, I was home-schooling our four children and we were living in the house where my partner, Bob Corker, had grown up in Kaiwaka, Northland.
Growing out from under the dog kennels was this wild peach tree that no-one had planted. It had just germinated from around the Kaipara Harbour.
Every year it had this incredible crop of peaches, and the kids
would climb up on the dog kennel roof and gorge themselves. I’d also bottle heaps, but there was still enough to have wars with. I was always amazed at how good they tasted − completely different from anything in the supermarkets.
I collected loads of amazing fruit trees around the Kaipara (from all the original settlers). I didn’t even know what I was collecting because at that point the possums were eating all of the new growth, so we had to take them home and graft them and wait for the fruit.
It wasn’t until 1986, the year of the Chernobyl disaster that I began saving our heritage vegetable seeds. My motherin-law Mary is an incredible gardener (she’s now 96 and still goes out in the garden every day in her wheelchair) and she and I went to Mystery
Creek Fieldays.
We walked into the seed tent and the stallholder said something to me that changed my life. He asked, ‘Do you realise the only seeds we can buy here, which are grown in New Zealand, are Pukekohe Longkeeper onions and all the rest come from Holland?’ I know now that wasn’t entirely true, but it served to galvanise me.
At that time, Holland was under a nuclear cloud and I was horrified we were in a position in this land, where we were totally dependent on the northern hemisphere for our food security. How could we let that happen? I felt totally powerless and was determined to do something about it.
A week later, I joined the Kaiwaka gardening club. At my first meeting, a woman held her hand out to me and said, ‘I know you, you’re the lady that likes fruit trees. I thought you might like these bean seeds?’
The seeds, once owned by a
Dalmatian gum-digger, had been carefully grown out every year for the last 60 years in order to keep them going. Families were looking for people to pass these seeds to because their families weren’t continuing to grow a garden.
Other seeds started pouring in. I was featured in the New Zealand Gardener and got
500 letters from that one article. It showed me that our heritage food plants open windows into old memories and that people really do care.
At Koˉanga, we’ve now got around 800 vegetable cultivars, which include some heritage flowers and herbs. I realised when you eat something with a whakapapa and a story, it connects you to the land and to people. The phrase, ‘You are what you eat’ is actually profoundly true.
One of the things to have the biggest impact on me though was my nana’s garden, in Marton. It felt like a magic place to me as a kid − the hedge with the chooks behind it and the plum trees.
I remember standing at her
gate as she looked up the street and said, ‘Oh that lady up there just had a baby, I must take her some dinner.’ Or, ‘That neighbour’s just come home from hospital so I must pick a bunch of flowers to drop off.’ And I realised having a garden means you’ve always got something to give.”