NorthTec - Te Pūkenga

The community garden spaces at NorthTec have predominantly been led and managed by students studying level 7 lifestyle nutrition, and health and wellness courses.

The space is home to four garden beds with produce freely available to students, including a permanent strawberry patch that the campus students are able to pick on their way past.

In the garden

One garden bed houses a substantial rosemary bush that we have used to make rosemary oil. The oil can be used in cooking and for hair/scalp health. The rosemary is also used by the campus café for table decorations and in their recipes.

​Unfortunately, over the years, the rosemary has stripped the nutrients from that garden, and the one next to it ended up not being very productive, so we have recently planted mustard lupin mix with sunflowers to deliver nutrients back into the soil and make the gardens look pretty over summer and improve mental wellbeing. Not only do sunflowers look fantastic, the heads can be barbequed at the end of the season.

The final garden has parsley, perpetual spinach, peas, spring onions, mint (in pots to stop spreading), basil and coriander. These are able to be used by passing campus students, and there are QR codes with labels to show recipes and how to pick, etc. The café uses these herbs and vegetables every single day, as part of the garden plan was to liaise with café to make sure we plant what they need so that the campus students were getting the extra benefits of the garden to plate nutrients.