When we moved here, we were really fortunate in that it was an older garden. But it’s by the beach, there’s lots of sand and it had lots of rats and mice – as all gardens do. So there wasn’t a lot of regrowth happening, or biodiversity in it, or the soil.
The first job was to do lots of trapping. It was a year or so of intense work – we caught a lot of rats, caught a lot of mice. And we started composting. I make about 500 kilograms of compost a year to build the soil up – increase the nutrients, bring back the birds.
I had three or four traps around the property. As we stared to remove the pests and improve the soil, we started to see all this new growth pop up because the seed and the new growth wasn’t being eaten. The birds came back because there were seeds to eat. So there was a cycle, kicked off by trapping and soil health.
We’ve got so many birds now. I go out in my garden and there are wētā, there are worms. When you get the mice out of your garden, you get more worms. Mice are great foragers of seed, which means the seed can’t turn into a tree. We forget it, because of our disconnection with the natural world.
All the plants in my garden I either propagate from seed, or there’s lots of natural seed dispersal. All the way through my garden are hundreds of nīkau – they come from the compost and they come from the birds, which eat the seed and spit them out and then they drop to the ground and grow.
We do a lot of planting, but we also just let the plants grow. I love the idea of a forest garden – it’s wild, it’s not controlled. We should just turn our gardens into sponges and mulch everything. Lawn is great for kids to run around on, but it really should be a forest. It’s an age thing. I love nothing more than being in the garden. Everything flows down from there.
Plants and soil are part of a much bigger web of birds and bugs and soil and plants and seeds and seasons. In that way, they’re great teaching tools – great for kids. We talk about floods and droughts, and gardens can be a powerful vehicle to discuss some of these big issues we’re facing.
The neighbours love it too. I’ll often be out the front and they’ll ask what I’m up to. I give loads of plants away – it’s a good community thing.
I’ve still got traps out there, but I’m lucky because where we live is now part of Predator Free Wellington. If you can imagine a map of Wellington, the Miramar Peninsula is now free of rats and stoats and possums. They’re moving west – Lyall Bay is now pest free. Eventually Predator Free will link up with The Capital Kiwi Project, and Wellington will be pest free, which I think is a world first.
It’s going to change how we think about our gardens and our cities. The knockdown effort is huge. Then there’s maintenance, and what you have to do if you get an incursion. As soon as you remove pests from an area, you create a vacuum and other pests will move into that space. Pests have home ranges and territories; they want their quarter acre. By taking a city-wide approach, we get them all.
This is exactly why we started Goodnature. We saw an opportunity to develop automatic traps and scale up trapping by enabling people like you and me, kids, grandparents to do it. Trapping was a niche activity – the traps were heavy. So that was the vision, allow Kiwis to get out into nature, undertaking trapping in their backyard.
I love the way the land is naturally restoring itself. You get to this point where it starts to snowball – the plants get there by birds, or by wētā dispersing kawakawa seeds. Then all these mechanisms and processes start happening within the garden, between birds and bugs and lizards – even rain, washing seeds into different parts of the garden.
Gardens are slow things – well, they are and they aren’t. I’ve been here four years and that’s not slow, it’s overnight! I’ve taken a piece of sandy soil where nothing grew and now it’s got hundreds of plants in it, a third which I’ve planted and two-thirds of which have just appeared. It’s a beautiful process to watch.
Goodnature
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