The nutrient-rich gardening gem
Shannon Wright has turned a passion for nutrient-rich food into a growing business of goodness.
Small-scale market gardener Shannon Wright is growing a business of goodness
The rabbits love Shannon Wright’s garden, and you know how they feel. It’s very easy to nibble your way down row after row of her spray-free, organically grown crops. A pulled carrot comes out of the ground so clean, it just needs a wipe before you chomp into its sweet crispness. By the time you’ve had a taste of all the leafy greens, it’s the equivalent of a large, fresh salad, and you’re not even halfway around the garden.
It’s the kind of place that makes you feel good, and that’s important to Shannon.
“Gardening this way makes me come alive; it fulfils me. It’s growing food and helping others, which is so inspiring to me.”
Her metamorphosis from office worker to market gardener began after she did a permaculture design course with NZ garden guru Kay Baxter at the Koanga Institute near Wairoa.
“I spoke to (husband) Raymond after doing that course and said, ‘I don’t want to go back to working in an office, I want to do what I feel really good doing.’”
Friends and neighbours Cynthia and Rob were keen to support Shannon, leasing her a third of a hectare (¾ acre) former sheep paddock a minute’s walk up the road. She did more training with bio-intensive grower and friend Jodi Roebuck (roebuckfarm.com), and Canadian grower and Urban Farmer author, Curtis Stone (theurbanfarmer.co).
Two years later, there’s a 630m² tunnel house that Shannon and Raymond
pulled apart, transported, and re-built (thank goodness for a husband who used to be a builder, says Shannon). Its curtainlike sides can be lifted on hot summer days for airflow, or rugged up tight to keep the temperature noticeably warmer than outside on a cold winter's morning.
It's a big change from the little polytunnels she used to have covering rows of the garden.
“To be honest, they were a pain in the behind. We get really bad south-westerlies here so you'd go down to the garden, and everything would be ripped up and tossed around. Hoops were broken, even though you'd try to pin them down.”
When you walk into most commercial growing houses, what you notice after the jolt of warmth and humidity is the wafting metallic tang of chemicals from sprays and fertilisers. The air in Shannon's tunnel house is sweet with the scent of fresh greens and earth. She's begun the paperwork for the official organic certification process but has been following strict organic practices for years.
“It's a whole package; how I look after the soil, how I look after the microbes in my gut. It revolves around health. Everything you put into the soil has got to be healthy and good for it."
Her goal is to grow the most nutrientrich vegetables she can. That starts with feeding the microbe population in the soil.
“The microbes attached to the plant roots enable the plant to uptake nutrients and that brings the Brix levels up,” says Shannon. “But I find that it's really hard to do it with lettuce, probably because it's quite a watery leaf. This is sandy soil, and it's a work in progress all the time.”
Shannon has added copious amounts of compost to the soil. However, the compost came with a downside – too much bacteria, not enough fungi.
“I stopped using that compost and now use a lot of vermicast from worms, it's great food for the soil. Since I've been using it, the worm life has come up everywhere, it's quite incredible.”
Shannon buys certified organic vermicast from Revital Fertiliser in Cambridge. This year, she plans to start making fungi-enriched compost herself. The key is getting the carbongreens mix right.
“I'm waiting on a delivery of dry wood shavings from a furniture shop, to make sure they're all untreated. I've said to them I don't want any pine in it – it's allelopathic and sucks the life out of the soil – so it'll be white wood which is best for fungi or types of wood that don't smell too strong.”
Shannon runs experiments in a smaller tunnel house beside her home. It's where you'll find her first turmeric and ginger crops, and an unusual array of herbs not normally mentioned in your average cookbook: stevia, ashwagandha, burdock, chicory, feverfew, vervain, valerian, hibiscus flowers, and motherwort.
"It's a whole package, how I look after the soil... everything you put into the soil has got to be healthy and good for it."
The main garden next door is significantly bigger. It's dedicated to leaf crops such as red and green lettuces, komatsuna, tatsoi, kale, and spinach. Most are harvested as tasty ‘baby' crops, then cut, rinsed, spun (in an old Fisher & Paykel washing machine), and bagged for sale.
There are rows of root crops: beetroot, radish, baby turnips, and Shannon's best-selling magic carrots.
“Carrots are my specialty; they're the talk of the farmers' market. They can grow from really small to really big, but they're always really, really tasty.”
Shannon puts that down to the soil, and the certified organic carrot seed. It's expensive to buy, and she pays more to get it pelletised but says it pays off.
“I get it pelletised so I can put it in my seeding machine and just run down the row sowing it, and I don't have to thin them. It's really expensive seed, but it's so worth it for the flavour.”
Backyard Jem is only a couple of years old, but Shannon has big plans. She's just opened a store in Ngaruawahia selling her crops and those of other sprayfree, organic growers, and has begun selling wholesale. She's trying to get a local vegetable subscription box group up and running and is an active committee member of her local farmers' market.
Most importantly, she wants to get more of her community eating locally-grown, nutrient-dense foods.
"It's really
expensive seed,
but it's so worth
it for the flavour"
“I've got my hands in 15 different places, so my main focus is about streamlining my systems and procedures.
“The biggest lesson I've learned is it's not that hard. You just need to be more aware and mindful with your actions and decisions. Start with small changes and keep adding to fit in with your life.”
The mother of three – Ethan (18), Jack (10), and Izabel (3) – applies the same principles to her own life. She's in bed by 8.30pm, up at 5.30am, and her first job of the day is self-care.
“I do some meditation, some journaling, I read, I learn. It helps that I'm really organised, and I've got great support around me.”