KEEPING IT REAL
Dee Turner has turned down management roles to stay in Taranaki, educating people on growing organic. She talks to Sonja Slinger about life and teaching.
Dee Turner’s journey was always going to be around growing. She grew up in a small village in North Wales, where her mother had led the family on a whim for a better life when housing development threatened to ruin the idyllic life they had in England.
‘‘She just decided we had to move once she knew those houses would take over the fields next door,’’ recalls Dee fondly.
‘‘She found this business for sale, it was a cafe in this tiny village in Wales and she bought it. Just like that.
‘‘My father always did anything my mother wanted to do so that’s where we went, it was fantastic.’’
Her mother was into gardening and growing most of their food and making natural fertilisers, while her father was a self sufficiency buff, even if only on the page, says Dee.
‘‘He just read so much about self sufficiency and he had all these ideas and we had loads of discussions about it all but he never actually put it into practice,’’ she smiles.
‘‘Mum, Tina – Tina Turner – simply the best, ha,ha – did most of the growing and planning and Dad would build the structural things she needed and that’s how they worked, they had a lovely relationship.’’
Dee got her name, Derina, from her parents combining their names and as a child growing up, it was definitely unusual. ‘‘But now with Facebook, you see so many out there with the same name, most of them people in Indonesia,’’ she laughs.
It seems a natural progression with a childhood among fields and flowers and parents who were keen gardeners and driven to give their two girls a natural upbringing, that Dee would follow a career in something growing.
She left school at 16, bored with it all and detesting every moment, and got a job waitressing. After about 18 months she decided that, actually, she needed a decent education so back she went, to night classes gaining her A levels and then to a secretarial course.
That opened the way to a career that would lead to teaching.
‘‘I’d only been at this firm as a secretary for about six months and computers were starting to take off but nobody there really knew how to work them, so I ended up learning and teaching them.
‘‘I thought I could probably earn lots of money doing this if I was actually a teacher so that’s what I did.’’
She stayed in Wales and taught in tertiary and covered a broad spectrum – economics, maths, accounting, consumer law and English to foreign students. She found she loved it and her students helped her realise she had something special.
‘‘I will never forget one day I was meeting a friend at the uni for coffee and this girl in a graduation gown was coming towards me. I thought I knew her from somewhere but couldn’t think where. She stopped me, threw her arms around me and said: ‘I am so glad I have met you on this day. I thought I could never succeed in education but I’ve just completed a three-year social work degree, and you were the one who helped me believe I could do something.’ I was just blown away.’’
Dee stayed teaching for a few more years then set up her own training company but it wasn’t long before she found she was bogged in managing and little in teaching plus she was working huge hours.
‘‘I was exhausted and really, missing what I loved most, teaching.’’
She decided to take a year off and travel to the country furthest in the world from Wales. She took refuge in Australia, where she saw a lot and experienced a whole new land, vastly different from wet, grey Wales. She then went to New Zealand for eight weeks where she met an American builder who became her partner.
‘‘He wanted to move from Australia where he’d been working and I didn’t want to go to the States and he certainly didn’t want to go to Wales, so we decided to move to New Zealand.’’
It was June 2003, mid-winter but they didn’t notice. They bought an old van and travelled New Zealand’s perimeter looking for a place to settle. ‘‘I think we drove along every coastal road there is in the North Island,’’ she says.
‘‘About eight weeks into the trip, we reached Awakino and driving along that highway
"Seeing that mountain, it was like ‘wow’"
Dee Turner
towards New Plymouth and seeing that mountain, it was like ‘wow, what do we have here?’
They decided to have two nights at an eco backpackers on Kent Road in New Plymouth and ended up staying 18 months. ‘‘We helped them build their bach and they helped us find our piece of land on Korito Road.’’
It was 10 acres of rough ground and a lot of work but Dee devoured it. She returned to teaching to fund their land and build project, working at Te Roti Brethren School. She enjoyed being back in the class, especially a small school but found she preferred teaching in tertiary.
She moved on, teaching parttime at New Plymouth’s Pacific International School while at the same time studying organic horticulture and permaculture.
She picked up a job tutoring at a course she’d been a student on, which had been led by South Taranaki’s gardening guru Michael Self and Witt picked it up to offer evening classes in New Plymouth in 2007.
She has developed and run so many courses since, all based on organic horticulture, got involved in various community groups and initiatives that she is somewhat of a go-to for anything organic related. She is hugely popular as a teacher on all her courses.
Two years ago she bought an acre of land and a house in New Plymouth and runs many of her courses from there, totally transforming her property from an overgrown flower garden that was shadowed by large weed trees, as she calls them – flowering cherries, willows and plane trees and 600 rose bushes.
Now it’s a food producing wilderness – beds billowing with vegetables and fruit trees along every fence, pathways planted in strawberries and wild herbs and a beehive to pollinate it all. The variety of food is impressive, various types of tropicals, including ginger, paw paw, guavas, sugar cane, even hops for making some home brew down the track.
She’s had woofers (Workers on Organic Farms) in to help with the heavy work plus students learn the practical side of study by reaping what they sow. Dog Bella and cat Rocket like to roam in a patch of native bush down the back which boasts two ancient rimu trees, estimated Dee says to be 400 years old, and a quiet creek threads its way along the rear ensuring constant water to the garden.
There’s not much in the way of flowers, Dee is not into them, only those which feed the bees and serve a purpose. Her purpose is to teach that we can all grow food, no matter how much space we have, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot.
She’s inspiring and truly passionate about what she does.