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Gardening

Details   Physical garden work such as pruning, weeding, grafting
Price   $40.00

Constructing and working with a chookhouse gardening system

Combining chookhouse and glasshouse is one of the classic permaculture examples of stacking functions, closing loops and all that but not something I had ever come across. It makes sense on a lot of levels:
  • Why have 2 buildings when you can have one
  • Waste products from chickens are great inputs for plants (manure, heat, CO2...)
  • Chickens eat insects and plant material and are great for preparing soil for planting
  • Plants grow well in sheltered, warm environment
May 05, 2016
Food forest gardening site visit, tour and workshop

Food forest gardening site visit, tour and workshop

We enjoyed showing our garden and emerging food forest to a group of curious individual from the greater Hurunui district. About 20 people made the journey out to Blockhill to learn more about our version of food forest gardening. The event was organised as part of the Hurunui Time Bank Learning Exchange Program
March 08, 2015
Summer gardening

Summer gardening

Details   It's been another exceptionally dry summer but things are holding on. Our land shaping captures and retains moisture and the mixed planting reduces competition while maximizing shade and surface area.
Date   January 04, 2018
Tags     2018  January 

Learn about foodscaping / food forest gardening

Develop an understanding of how to design and implement your own food forest garden with a one on one guided tour and discussion session.
  • Explore the extensive, established forest garden at blockhill
  • Learn identify, develop and exploit niches to grow a wider range of useful plants
  • Discuss mixed and companion planted polycultures and guilds
  • Understand plant succession for ecosystem transition and transformation
  • Witness beneficial insects and extreme biodiversity
  • Meet the chooks, ducks and pigs and see how they fit into the system
  • Overview of useful hand tools
2 hours
$80.00
Engage with nature

Engage with nature

Develop gardening and tree maintenance skills in a food forest context
  • plant identification
  • vegetable growing & seed saving
  • using tools for land management
  • planting, pruning & shaping living trees
  • land shaping for water retention
Foragescaping

Foragescaping

Details   Gardening with the seasons
Helping hands

Helping hands

Details   2 hours of hands on practical work per day depending on the weather
  • Making and improving gardens
  • Fruit harvesting
  • Planting and pruning trees
Setting of expectations

Setting of expectations

The expectations we have about what we should be eating and when determines what options are open to us in terms of where and how we obtain our sustenance. By adjusting our requirements and evaluations of what makes something desirable food we open up new sources and types of fruit and vegetables. This is a prerequisite of low input forest gardening.
November 22, 2015
Melisa

Melisa

I am most content when I am surrounded by animals and nature. I've learned a lot about self reliance and resilience since my Blockhill journey began in 2009. I've acquired skills in food preservation, gardening, knitting, sewing and animal care. I love spending time with my Kune Kune pigs, muscovy ducks, silkie chickens, and my cat Chappie. Olmec and I continue to learn something new every day as we navigate our way through this unique and enriching life.

I've written and illustrated 4 children's picture books and they are all available for purchase here on our website.

I also have an interest in health and well being from a natural and alternative approach, and have a good understanding of plants and their various health benefits. Having had some health issues in recent years, I've explored many alternative options to mainstream medicine. I can advise on my own personal approach to healing from endometriosis and ovarian cysts (endometrioma) through a combination of gluten-free diet, plant based vegan diet, herbal supplementation, visualisation and meditation. It took time and some hard work but I believe my lifestyle changes made a significant difference and helped me avoid another surgery.

Please feel free to contact me if you have similar health concerns and you would like further information about my approach.

Chris

We had a fantastic and informative visit to the beautiful forest garden at Blockhill. We did the foodscaping/forest gardening workshop, and it was well worth it. We learned heaps! Melisa and Olmec were very friendly, welcoming, and knowledgeable. We would highly recommend it to anyone interested in permaculture or forest gardening.
November 01, 2023
Comfrey root pieces for growing

Comfrey root pieces for growing

Botanical name   Symphytum officinale
Details   Easily grown from root pieces, comfrey is a valuable and popular addition to any food forest garden. Widely used in organic and permaculture gardening, this plant is a fantastic soil improver and mulch producer. Suitable for a wide range of conditions and situations.
Perennial  
Price   $4.90  5 root pieces
Out of stock

The edible landscape

We grow a huge range of edible plants in our forest garden. This is a natural way of gardening that mixes many types of beneficial and practical plants to produce healthy food and create a rich biodiversity of organisms. There are no chemicals used in our landscape.

Fruit and vegetables for sale (dependant on season)
Please ask us if you would like to buy some of our fruit or vegetables.

Help yourself to...
You are welcome to pick fresh herbs from in front of the cabin. You will find sage, rosemary, mint, chives, thyme, oregano and other herbs to include in your meals.
Seeds

Seeds

Collecting and storing seeds for planting in the seasons ahead is an essential component of gardening.
I have a reasonable assortment of purchased, traded and gathered seeds that was in dire need of a tidy up.
September 19, 2010
Knowledge tours

Knowledge tours

Details   Students from the Kaikoura Creation Care Study Program spent an afternoon at Blockhill touring and learning about forest gardening, water catchment and other aspects of sustainable land use.
Date   May 09, 2017
Tags     education 
Hugelkultur gardens in summer

Hugelkultur gardens in summer

Details   Every year, since their construction, our hugelkultur raised woody garden beds have been improving in performance. While waiting for the perennial plantings to establish we have been gardening with seasonal crops including maize, pumpkins, tomatoes, salad, cucumbers and of course lots of beans. Modest additions of straw mulch, trenched in pig manure, compost tea and all plant residues are contributing to the overall fertility of the beds and on occasion where I have exposed the wooden core while digging it is clearly breaking down into a crumbly organic 'compost'.
Date   February 18, 2018
Tags     garden  hugelkultur  2018  summer 
Food Forest Weekend Experience

Food Forest Weekend Experience

Summer 2023-24: North Canterbury, New Zealand

Grow your passion, interest and understanding of food forests and natural gardening

Experience and explore 2 hectares of established, 14 year old forest gardens

Olmec

Olmec

Having grown up on a small organic farm in North Canterbury, I have a lifelong connection to land, gardening and ecological awareness.

In 2005, seeking adventure, I left my Wellington life and software engineering job behind and went backpacking through Australia and into South-East Asia. For 8 months I worked and travelled, gaining a new perspective, first hand, on other ways to live, different value systems and the nature of our expectations. Poor, remote villagers always seemed so happy in their simple lives and displayed an evident commitment to family, community and place.

Over the next 4 years I began looking into the consequences of human settlement and our impact on our surroundings as a result of our attempts to globalise a techno-industrial capitalist system. What I discovered alarmed me and galvanised my direction to begin preparing my life for the future I saw coming.

In 2009, My wife and I transitioned from city dwelling office workers to rural, self employed lifestyle entrepreneurs.
Since then I have been researching and implementing more sustainable ways of inhabiting the land and extracting a yield.
I still work with computers to solve problems and have taken that way of thinking about multiple, interacting, complex systems and applied it to everyday life. When I'm not running about in bare feet, I'm in front of the computer building websites. (Someone's got to pay the bills)

Gradually I am developing my understanding of natural systems and how they can support human needs while organising the assorted solutions to share with the rest of my species. I see this as the great work of our time, to reinvent ourselves and our culture for the better.
Living on contour - working with water flow

Living on contour - working with water flow

Water is the essence of life and as such we need to be thinking about how to make best use of what we have. The most important work we do is to implement solutions for capturing, storing, diverting and infiltrating rainwater and runoff. This helps build soil, nourish crops, prevent erosion, minimise drought and reduce or eliminate irrigation needs.
Learn about the art of land shaping for natural rainfall catchment, a practical guide to water harvesting and management.
Make the most of the water available, direct surplus water away from wet areas towards dry areas.
Use swales and terraces to halt the flow of water and nutrient off the land and allow it infiltrate and hydrate the soil.
August 21, 2014
  water  swale  contour 
Converting an existing orchard to food forest

Converting an existing orchard to food forest

When we took over the property it came with an orchard consisting of plums, almonds, cherry, apricot, apples, peaches, nashi and pears. The trees are of varying ages and were planted more or less randomly across what was once an open paddock. Slowly I have been contouring, inter-planting, removing grass, mulching and generally intensifying the productivity of the area.
September 01, 2013
Reinventing the parking structure

Reinventing the parking structure

A look at possible urban farming in the post petroleum future, making the most of the situation and thinking about survival.

The voices in the peak oil conversation have made it clear to me that problems with the production and transportation of vegetables will demand more food to be grown closer to the point of consumption - back yards, roof tops, window sills and so on.
Kunstler believes that cities will contract, and those on the coast (exposed to sea level rise) are certainly likely to, as are those that require air conditioning or heating to make the climate bearable.

June 21, 2010
  Urban  Future  Farming 
Garden update

Garden update

Our garden is bigger and better this year with more planning, improved soil and larger variety of plants in the ground. We are just starting to reap the rewards.
December 09, 2010
  garden  summer 
Hardenbergia vine seeds

Hardenbergia vine seeds

Common name   Coral vine
Botanical name   Hardenbergia
Details   Vigorous evergreen climber native to Australia. Requires a warm, sheltered location. Can grow in dry conditions. Purple or pink and white flowers loved by bees in early spring.
Drought tolerance  
Evergreen  
Frost sensitive  
Nitrogen fixer  
Perennial  
Tags     flowers  N fixer  purple  tender  vine 
Price   $3.90  20 seeds
Flowers   Pink / purple
Yellow bush / tree lupine

Yellow bush / tree lupine

Botanical name   Lupinus arboreus
Details   A fast growing woody lupine with yellow flowers and a sweet scent. Grows well in poor quality soil and makes a good source of biomass and quick low growing shelter and habitat. Short lived perennial bush or shrub that grows in poor conditions. Nitrogen fixing
Evergreen  
Nitrogen fixer  
Perennial  
Tags     flowers  N fixer  shrub  yellow 
Price   $3.90  20 seeds
Osteospermum

Osteospermum

Common name   African daisies, daisybushes
Botanical name   Osteospermum
Details   Easy care plant for dry areas. Does not tolerate hard frost Covered with bright flowers for much of the year, enjoyed by bees.
Drought tolerance  
Frost sensitive  
Perennial  
Tags     flowers  pink 
Price   $3.90  20 seeds
Learn More Out of stock
Hopi Black Dye Sunflower

Hopi Black Dye Sunflower

Botanical name   Lunaria annua
Details   Similar to the regular, common sunflower but often having multiple smaller flowers and dark purple / black seed casing that the Hopi people of North America have traditionally used to make a dye for cotton, wool and basketry
Edible  
Seeds / nuts / tubers  
Tags     edible  flowers  yellow 
Price   $4.90  20 seeds
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