Growing Goodness Not Grass - A sneak peek inside The Summer Lane Project

By Carl Muir

How many people can you feed from a 1200sqm suburban backyard? It turns out, quite a few!

Today, we’re getting a tour of “The Summer Lane Project” - a permaculture market garden, established last year in the backyard of Jayden Blomfield’s family house in Tairua. It is the middle of winter, but the place is abuzz with colour, and abundant with edible goodness. 

So much goodness, in fact, that Jayden, his wife and two young botanically named children Acacia-Anne and Koa, do not have to buy any veges at any point during the year. He also supplies approximately 20 local households each week with fresh produce, and two local restaurants with their micro-greens.

In summer, Jayden tells us, this place is like a jungle. “There are pumpkins everywhere, kumara vines crawling along the ground. I literally have to hack a path to get around.”

Calendula and nasturtium flowers are growing wild everywhere. Jayden says they attract the bees, keep the bugs under control, and they’re also edible. He picks a handful of petals and snacks on them. Rows of annuals like kale and radish are companion grown in long permaculture style beds. Flourishing carrot, garlic, elephant garlic, beetroot, lettuce and pak choy take up large parts of the garden. There’s more annuals like broccoli interspersed between fruit trees.  It is all part of Jayden’s permaculture and biodynamic approach to growing food.

It doesn’t stop there. There’s half a dozen flourishing passionfruit vines, including a rare yellow passionfruit. Fig trees. Avocado. Taro flourish at the moist bottom of the sloped section. And then there’s Jayden’s unique greenhouse where he grows microgreens, chilli plants and his seedlings. The greenhouse has been constructed from recycled windows, door frames and old timber. “The neighbours thought I was crazy collecting all this stuff - but I’m pretty proud to have built something like this myself, completely from recycled materials.” This theme continues through the garden, with recycled pellets put together to fence out the family dog, Oreo, and asparagus growing inside an old kauri window frame.

Jayden is your quintessential Coromandel local. He is extremely forthcoming with his trade secrets and humble and philosophical about what he is achieved.

“I get imposter syndrome and question myself like anyone else, asking myself am I really good enough to do this? Sometimes you try to grow something and it fails. But you learn from it, and the next time it might be a success. That trial and error is what I love about gardening and in particular permaculture, you are always learning. It’s where growth comes from. If things fail it doesn’t matter, because the successes are great. A good garden - it not only looks good - it tastes good too!”

So what are some of Jayden’s tricks of the trade?

Number one he tells us is really good arborist mulch. To demonstrate this Jayden digs his finger into the ground, it takes a good 10cm before he gets through the arborists  mulch and into the base soil, which is stays very moist in summer, out comes a worm at the same time and Jayden shows us some of the fungal elements that are breaking down the bark. That he says, is where the good soil comes from. When Jayden first moved on site three years ago, the backyard was long kikuyu grass. “I put sheep in here to attack the grass and then lots of tarps, and then mulch and truckloads of compost.” Now there is not a stalk of kikuyu to be seen anywhere on the property. “Pretty much everything growing here is edible.”

Lots of crops are left to self seed.Including kumara which self sprout each spring.  His heaviest last year weighed in at a whopping 4.2kg! Jayden digs down into the ground around what appears to be another vine that has died back over winter and produces a different sort of tuber - Yakon.  These are a South American plant which humans cannot digest the sugar from. Jayden tells us a syrup made from Yakon is a great sweetener that does not impact your blood sugar.

The best thing about Jayden’s garden is that there are no sprays or chemicals used on the property at all. It’s an approach Jayden has formed through his own life journey. Escaping the gruelling hours of 10 years in the restaurant game as a chef, Jayden found himself studying to be a viticulturist. “I found the approach in the New Zealand wine industry, of intensive chemical spraying, quite frankly, horrendous” That led Jayden to further study - biodynamics and then putting it to practice at Ohui Vineyard and beef farm, transitioning them into organics for 7 years. “The first two years were hard graft, for us and the animals, they were used to drenching, but by year three everything just started flourishing. Seeing the changes holistically, it really set in stone for me that organics is the way forward.”

Now Jayden says he is a full time stay at home Dad, part time market gardener. He gets time to enjoy watching his young family grow, and plenty of time to catch a few waves when the surf is pumping. 

As we wrap up our tour, Jayden’s wife returns from kids music with Acacia-Anne and Koa. The other Mums from the group have sent back food scraps to feed to their chickens. “Everything here is a closed loop and it's great to see the community and our friends pick up on that as well. The whole principle of biodynamics is seeing everything as one. The ash from our fire is all non toxic, and goes into the garden, the same with all of the food scraps. I could send this food I grow out of town, but it all stays here locally, nourishing the locals.

As this philosophy rubs off on others, Jayden’s expertise is being called on, and Jayden’s latest venture is “edible landscaping” or basically planning out other people’s edible backyards and helping them put everything into place.

Looking at what Jayden has achieved, I think his services will be in demand.

You can get hold of Jayden’s goodness every Saturday morning on his stand outside The Shop, Main Road Tairua.

Follow:

https://www.facebook.com/SummerLaneProject