Life is good at Stratford’s ‘Commune’
CATHERINE GROENESTEIN
A joke about setting up their own commune during a late-night conversation led to two Taranaki couples building the life they’d each wanted, on shared land.
Sisters Min McKay and Zoe Pepper along with their husbands, Ryan and Ricky, and their children, share the work but each have their own space.
The sisters grew up on a family farm at Toko, while their husbands are cousins.
The two couples began developing the property, originally bought by Ricky and Zoe, near Stratford about four and a half years ago.
The sisters remember watching their Nan, an expert gardener, growing vegetables, and they now have an impressive garden themselves.
An array of vegetables are growing in rows in tidy beds, with a large netting-covered berry house at one end and a hothouse of tomatoes at the other.
The families take turns on alternate days picking berries because the kids tend to eat them as fast as they grow, Zoe said.
“It started out as a big paddock,” she said.
“Initially Ricky and I built the shed that was going to be his workshop. We were living somewhere else and had to get out of that house, so we moved into the shed.”
Shed-living suited them, so they decided to avoid more debt, instead converting the shed into a permanent home.
They have two children, Evalyn, 4, and Wyllie, 2.
“At the time, Min and Ryan were living in New Plymouth, but we both knew we wanted to grow our own food,” Zoe said.
“One night, the conversation came up: ‘why don’t you guys come here’.”
The four get along well, which makes the project feasible. Decisions are made by consensus.
After plenty more discussion and thought, Min and Ryan, who now have a son, 2-year-old Mick, bought a share of the property and built their home there.
Together, they have set up a small-scale vegetable and flower farm, growing without using chemicals, which operated as
The Commune. The two homes are connected by their sprawling gardens.
It’s easy for their children to go between houses, and they help each other with child-minding.
Having four adults to work on the property is a huge advantage.
Both Ryan and Ricky work as builders, so Zoe and Min do the bulk of the day-today garden work.
Min is a Stratford District Councillor. Zoe is in charge of planning the garden and business.
Everyone had defined roles and responsibilities, Zoe said.
They grow way more food than they can eat, and sell it via vegetable boxes, along with holding workshops on gardening and bouquet-making, and the occasional open day.
“We like hosting people here, I think you have to be here to see how it works, for people to see what we do, see where the flowers they’re arranging and the food they’re eating come from,” Min said.
The two families don’t often buy vegetables, and they have a young orchard growing which they hope will eventually provide much of their fruit.
They grow shell-out beans for storing over winter, and do preserving for the leaner months.
Both families eat mainly vegetarian. Ricky sometimes hunts for wild game and they keep hens for eggs, while Ryan and Min are vegan.
“The more you look at the food system in general, it’s a bit of a mess, it’s not really something we want to support,” Min said.