Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
‘Losing control’ is the key to success
Starting a food forest garden means you have to stop trying to control your environment. It also means you have to pull off “something of a mental con job” to avoid the unwanted attentions of family, friends and neighbours.
They want to interfere because it falls outside their idea of what a garden is, that traditional bordered, controlled and shaped garden, says Tinui Food Forest owner Deb Butterfield.
But “perfect is not on the radar,” says Butterfield, who started her food forest north-east of Masterton, near Castle Point, 23 years ago. The 12ha property includes a 1.6ha wild food forest with fruit trees and a kitchen garden food forest, which is just under a hectare.
Food forests are inherently wild and that wilderness can be a bit of a challenge for people, especially if they’re living in town, says Butterfield.
“If you’re starting a food forest, your aunty or neighbours will look over the fence and ask what the hell are you doing. Then they’ll offer to come and spray and prune it for you. And you can’t have that.”
To avoid the unwanted attention, Butterfield says you have to pull off something of a “mental con job”. That means providing some distractions for the eye, so that their gaze will be averted to an end point, such as a pond or chair, and surrounding climbing structures.
“What you do is start with some nice paths and a pretty gate. Then you add to the trees that are already there, and add some appealing climbing structures. You then plant to the path, plant around the trees and eventually they’ll join up.
“It’s about fooling people and giving them that sense of security,” says Butterfield.
Gardeners think they are losing control if weeds are left in the ground but it’s about changing perceptions.
“This whole concept of controlling your environment is a relatively recent thing,” says Butterfield. “You could probably trace it back to the 1950s when people started getting lawn mowers, but we’re all just being conditioned.
“So we’ve got wild plants, we haven’t got weeds. Beautiful chicory, Queen Anne’s lace, evening primrose. What you find is that when you give plants a little space and room to grow, you get some delightful surprises.”
The same applies to the kitchen garden, which is designed to look pretty with straight rows and climbing structures. “It’s only later when they look closely at the rows that you see what is cunningly hidden there - all the different levels of growth and wild plants.”
That sense of letting go helped Butterfield overcome the grief and anger caused by the damage done by Cyclone Gabrielle in February last year, when her gardens were covered by up to 200mm of silt, essentially subsoil and clay off the surrounding hillsides.
She had to temporarily close her homestay business and guided forest talks. With the garden open for visits again, she’s using her experience to educate traditional gardeners.
“After the silt came in we had a lot of dock growing and a lot of creeping buttercup.
“Those plants dominated at first, they were the first flush of growth after the silt. Then I got a lot of traditional gardeners coming around and commenting about all my weeds.
“But what those plants were doing to that soil was helping to break it up. The dock with its tap roots was mining into the soil and the buttercup with its hairnet roots was breaking it up.
“And I threw seeds everywhere - mustard seeds, lupins, scarlet clover, a lot of cover crops. The idea is to never have bare soil. As I kept putting on the mulch, and the soil was getting a bit more covered and freed up, the dock and buttercup disappeared.”
The grass is also harvested to throw on the gardens, along with leaves and animal manure (Butterfield has alpacas, goats, pigs, chickens, ducks and guinea fowl).
“I don’t have a compost bin so everything I’ve got just goes out on to the land.
“And I treat weeding like a cow comes in. I go out there with my gloves on and a pair of cutters and I grab handfuls of plants and just pull them off leaving the roots in and then I put that back on to the garden, it’s that constant mulching.”
The East Coast Rural Support Trust also provided manual help.
“I basically just gave them buckets full of cuttings, currants, goose berries and figs and whatever I could find for them to plant. And people dropped plants off to me. I’d get home and there’d be bags of plants on the veranda, it was amazing.”
Brassicas and broad beans were then planted into the mounded silt shovelled off the paths.
But the plantings were intentionally random.
“We basically try to let nature take the lead so part of that is trying not to intervene. Pretty much the plants do as they want, so for example, I’ll often grow the brassicas to a certain size then plant them out randomly into the kitchen garden.