Gardening

In Grey Lynn we have three community gardens and many people who garden in their backyard. Grey Lynn 2030 has an active gardening group who are looking at producing your own food from your home garden of public land. Urban Food Production is a modern name for it. In our group, people exchange seedlings and eventually surplus produce.

Wilton St Community Garden
We have a fantastic resource – the land. There is plenty to do to develop this into a lovely and sustainable community garden and we would welcome any keen people experienced gardeners or not, who’d like to join in.

Background
The garden is on privately owned land, consisting of two combined sites, belonging to the Gypsy Tea Room and the Wine Vault. The site was previously a very overgrown ‘vacant lot’ with a bad jasmine infestation. So far work on the garden has consisted mainly of weed clearance and rubbish removal, which has been carried out by a handful of enthusiastic locals, mostly neighbours from Wilton Street.

Plan
Our plan is to grow herbs, pickable fruit and vegetables and maybe have a compost unit for local people to bring their compostable waste to. We only have certainty of a medium term tenure estimated at 3-5 years minimum. We have made the decision to develop the garden as much possible using locally sourced recycled materials.  We are hoping to get unwanted plants and materials from the local community, garden centres and businesses.

The site already has an existing fig tree, nasturtiums, some old roses (including one covered in rosehips) and a bay tree.  We have recently planted a lemon and bananas salvaged from a nearby site being bulldozed for redevelopment.  One shady corner of the site is fenced off with trellis and has existing native plants and trees.  We plan to have this as quiet amenity garden, with the balance of the site – the sunny area, used for growing fruit and vegetables.

We have a regular working bee on the site every Sunday morning from 9am-12. As the garden becomes established, gardeners can work in and use the garden at any time.