ABOUT

Now a days food is grown to suit supermarkets, it will last longer on the shelves, it can be picked all within a few days, it can survive being dropped 1 metre, it looks pretty, we don’t get export quality fruit, we get the rejects…NOTHING about taste.

Heritage fruit tastes great… we want to fill the Kaiapoi Food forest with heritage trees.

Food Forests are living proof that industrial agriculture is not the only way to feed the world. In fact, we now recognize conventional agricultural practices to be a major contributor towards climate change, environmental destruction and desertification.

The Waimakariri District Council is going to lease 1.5acres of land to the Kaiapoi Food Forest Trust to develop a food forest.

A food forest functions as a healthy closed-loop ecosystem, with each organism playing a role. Each element of the system supports the whole. The many relationships happening in an ecosystem are imitated in a food forest which:
• builds soil and accumulates nutrients
• self-fertilizes, self-mulches, self-regulates
• produces  food, fiber, medicine, materials, fodder and more
• Sequesters Carbon, offsetting climate change
• provides habitat for all living organisms
• supports pollinators and beneficial insects
• protects and enhances biodiversity

Food forest aerial view
Food forest basic design idea

Here is a video of the first 10 months of the food forest:

Here is a link to the 2018 Council report:

Food forests on council land in New Zealand are nothing new, here is one in Waiheke Island….both in the early stages and one a little older.

The difference will be Kaiapoi’s food forest will be more than producing food for the community, we want to connect, nourish, educate, and inspire. Areas to congregate, areas to learn, areas to cook food. “food for mind and body”