Coast & Country News: Country Life + Style - October 2020

˜° August, ˜˛°˝

Country Life+Style Coast & Country News °

C O U N T R Y

Photo: Catherine Fry

From corporate London to rural Raglan Page 2

Setting up a flower farm

Six Toed Fox Organics

Phil’s paradise

Billy ‘Mushroom’

˜˛˜˛ Country Life+Style Coast & Country News ˜°October, August, 2020 ˜˛°˝

Setting up a flower farm Five years ago, if anyone had told South African Nicky Brzeska that she’d be trading in her urban London life, her stressful, highpowered PR management job and corporate wardrobe to run a flower farm in the rural surrounds of coastal town Raglan in New Zealand, she would have laughed.

Photos: Catherine Fry

˜

Yet today she is living with her English husband, Johnny, and their children Jack, 5, and Finn, 4, on a five-and-a-half-acre lifestyle block in Te Mata.

“We loved London, but knew we wanted another lifestyle,” says Nicky. “We wanted land; we wanted to get our hands dirty.”

After visiting her Auckland-based parents and brother on numerous holidays that longing for a new adventure just got stronger.

They threw in their jobs, and took a leap of faith, arriving in New Zealand in November 2016 with their children.

Within three weeks, before they even had phones, they bought their dream home in Raglan. “I saw the potting shed and turned to Johnny and said: ‘This is the place! This is the place!’

“It was as if someone had taken what we

Bu y a LX42 or RZTS46

Get a

Estate Honda Lawnmower free!

Wor th $899

Celebrating 50 years 1970 - 2020

07 282 7663

(NEW)

had in our minds and shown it to us.”

Initially, the plan was for Nicky to stay with the boys in Raglan, while Johnny commuted weekly to a geotech engineer job in Auckland.

“It was supposed to be for a few weeks, with me tidying up the rather neglected property, ready to rent it out and move up to Auckland.”

When the time came to move, Nicky didn’t want to leave and luckily Johnny managed to transfer his job to Hamilton 10 months later.

Seed of an idea

Nicky approached a local wedding flower business, who realised her event planning skills and passion for flowers would be useful. She never ended up working there because Kristel, of Raglan Floral Company, thought it was a much better idea for Nicky to grow flowers for her.

“She turned up one day with yards of black plastic to kill the grass, armfuls of dahlia tubers, packets of seeds, and some cloches.

“That’s how it started; she threw me in the deep end, and I was petrified!”

However, it was not all bad as Kristel has been incredible at sharing her knowledge, and the two women now have a good friendship, and close business partnership.

The site chosen for the flower garden

October, ˜˛˜˛ 2020 ˜° August, ˜˛°˝

Country Life+Style Coast & Country News ˙ Flower grower Nicky Brzeska at her Raglan flower farm.

“We loved London, but knew we wanted another lifestyle. We wanted land; we wanted to get our hands dirty.”

factored in the following: proximity to the workshop; full sun; shelter from the prevailing Raglan westerly by an orchard; and near the two 50,000 litre water tanks.

The slightly sloping, 300m2 site was tilled using a rotary hoe, and Nicky spent six months preparing the soil, which was luckily a sandy loam, volcanic ash.

“Tilling destroys the soil structure, so I only wanted to do it once.”

Nicky read extensively, visited other flower farms and fell back on what she’d learned on several Kew Gardens courses in England. Her goal was to build the soils up again and get microbes and worms back in there.

“I use biological fertilisers charged with fungi, microbes and good bacteria, paramagnetic basalt rock dust, activated lime; and I make compost and buy organic compost.”

Game-changer

Nicky believes the game-changer was adding biochar, an activated carbon product that produces noticeably better flower growth.

She doesn’t use pesticides or herbicides, manually removing caterpillars and pests, but she hasn’t had a major issue other than cows!

“A healthy soil produces healthy plants, and pests prefer to prey on unhealthy plants

MASADA

YEA

25

R

WA

RRANT Y

that have simple sugars that are easier to digest.”

Good fencing keeps the livestock out, and horticultural netting protects the plants.

Nicky specialises in flowers with a long-lasting vase life, and flowers that can be dried. She sells to florists, wedding specialists, retail stores and wholesalers in Raglan and Hamilton.

In her second season, Nicky has learnt to sow seeds and so progressively allowing successive harvests from December through to July the following year.

Her father fabricated a cloche over a table for her to tend to seedlings and it has really saved her back.

There is no watering schedule, and Nicky waters when she sees they need it. Her underground irrigation system drip feeds into the roots, so there is no evaporation and wastage.

“I use landscape fabric or mulch to hold moisture in the soil around the plants.”

During winter, Nicky sells dried flowers, a current big trend in floristry, and also enjoys the slower time for reflection.

She also loves the supportive environment of the NZ flower industry, and is an enthusiastic member of the Waikato Floral Collective, which sells wholesale flowers to florists on Thursdays in Whatawhata.

Catherine Fry

ˆ

˜˛˜˛ Country Life+Style Coast & Country News ˜°October, August, 2020 ˜˛°˝ Rachel Yeats, Brad Harding and Six Toed Fox’s tree guy Frank.

Growing community and family values with veges If you mix a passion for horticulture with a healthy dose of Kiwi ingenuity, a big spoonful of family values and a splash of entrepreneurship, you’d likely find the outcome would look something like Six Toed Fox Organics.

The family market garden located in Omanawa Falls is the culmination of Brad Harding’s passion for horticulture and a family desire to produce quality, ethical and local food.

They produce enough fruit and veg to have an online subscription box and webstore for people looking to buy fresh, organic produce.

But what’s with the name? Well, it’s all about family values, Kiwi ingenuity and the mahi the family put in to make their business work. “With our son Fox, I had this awful pregnancy brain fog for about nine months,” says Rachel Yeats, whose family-of-five with Brad is completed with children Gryphon and Juno.

“Then, when he was three days old, I remember sitting on the couch feeding him and looking at him; and everything just clicked.

“Six months later, with a lot of business planning, we were off. I always sort of felt like Fox had been the catalyst and then because he was so little and there were the two of us with this bootstrap business. We did a crowdfunding campaign and raised $10,000.

“That was how we started, that was all the money we had; $10,000 from other people. Fox just got dragged around with us everywhere – I was a working mama with a baby on my back, I’d go and do deliveries and I’d have him on one hip and a basket of veges on the other.

“We did farmers’ markets; I used to get all these cooing from old ladies, he’d need a feed and I’d still be serving and feeding.

Fox was born with six toes on one foot, which Rachel and Brad didn’t realise until he was about three days old. “He’s just a really quirky little character. We just felt it was a cool name to celebrate a cool thing.” “He calls it his farm now,” says Brad.

“It was just about connecting our family with the land. And I really like it,” says Rachel.

The couple say they’ve seen first-hand what connecting to and looking after the land can do.

There were a few fruit trees that had rumours surrounding them when they moved on to the property.

“The neighbours told us when we moved on that they’d never seen them fruiting so we should just go ahead and chop them down,” says Rachel.

“We decided we’d give them a year of TLC and we got Frank, our tree guy, on to it. He poured love all over them and then the harvest we got

last year from the nashi and apple trees was just phenomenal.”

“We got 180kg of nashi from one tree,” says Brad. “And that was just the weight of the strippicking, not what we ate as we went or those that fell on the ground.”

The couple say Six Toed Fox is all about taking care, providing love and working with the land – not just working the land for their own benefit.

Brad says there’s not many people doing what they’re doing.

“It’s quite rare to find a mixed vegetable farm.

You usually find a carrot grower or a broccoli grower but not so many mixed vegetables.”

“The family market garden located in Omanawa Falls is the culmination of Brad Harding’s passion for horticulture and a family desire to produce quality, ethical and local food”

“That’s one of the powers in our system is the huge diversity in what we have; we always have something to harvest and the way that they work together means we’re doing a good job of our integrated pest management,” says Rachel.

“We grow most of the things we put in our boxes right here. We do supplement them with other things because we do have crop failures or don’t anticipate the demand and don’t plant enough but the majority of the boxes are 75 per cent our stuff and through the summer it’s definitely 100 per cent our stuff.”

And it’s a lot of work – looking at the property you’d almost think it had always been that way.

Symmetrical beds, perfectly-spaced walkways, greenhouses for small and warm-loving plants...it looks so organised and natural. Very organic. Six Toed Fox is a fully certified organic property with Organic Farm NZ. Rachel says organics has an unusual market in New Zealand – one the team at Six Toed Fox is hoping to change. “There’s a weird perception of organic farming in NZ and that can be really difficult.

“In NZ the perception seems to be more that it’s just expensive food. We wish it could be cheaper but we don’t have that scale to be able to do things cheaper – and I don’t see that it’s the responsibility of the growers to make cheap food when you’re actually having the real cost of food.”

For out more about Six Toed Fox Organics at: www.sixtoedfoxorganics.co.nz Cayla-Fay Euinton

October, ˜˛˜˛ 2020 ˜° August, ˜˛°˝

Phil’s piece of paradise Soap-making and self-su° ciency Like a ponga fern, Phil Parker’s driveway off Wharawhara Rd slowly unfurls opening a glade behind a tree-lined boundary and your eyes to a relaxed country lifestyle within.

Hanging from lines of trees bright yellow citrus fruit greets you before an expansive duplex-style home, a lawn of green grass with South Devon stock behind a wire, then the chickens, ducks and vegetable gardens beyond.

When Phil is not tending to the needs of plants and animals, he can be found in the small Ruakiwi Homestead factory – a tiny cottage shed – making natural soaps.

“We came here five years ago after living in Taupo 30-odd years. We had a lifestyle block there and I worked for Taupo District Council as emergency manager and principal rural fire officer.”

But when it came time to retire, Taupo was too cold for what Phil and his wife Carole wanted to do. “We wanted to be more self-sufficient.”

One weekend in the Western Bay of Plenty they came across the Katikati property and thought: ‘Yes, this will do’. “There were no buildings on it and the place was rundown. There were trees everywhere. It took us a good 12 months to get it into shape.”

Citrus goodness The land did however have lemonade, grapefruit and orange and a few plum trees. About half were kept, and Phil has added pears, apples, peaches, a few more plums, grapes and passionfruit.

“We wanted a variety of fruit we could eat ourselves but I also sell some at the local markets.”

What about the soap-making? Three years ago Phil had got to the stage where he’d cleaned up the property and thought: ‘What am I going to do now?’

“On the internet I found goat’s milk soap and thought that was interesting. I did some research and it looked fun. Originally, I was only going to make it for ourselves.

I got hold of some people with goats at Te Aroha who sold me some goat’s milk and I made the first batch from a recipe I found online.

“Our family and friends liked it so I built a shed that we’ve set up as my little factory and got into it.

“Then it got to the stage where I went to the local markets with four types of soaps. They just went gangbusters and people started asking me for different types of soap. So I created more – it’s just gone crazy.

Now I also produce Manuka honey and oil soap for an

iwi honey-producing organisation. I make the soap, they buy it and market it themselves.”

Phil only uses natural oils in his soaps, which now come in liquid form too. “I get my olive oil directly from a Hastings factory. All my products are food grade – they contain olive oil, coconut oil, lard and I use essential oils, such as lavender and tea tree. I don’t use fragrance oils or chemicals. And that is really all there is to it.”

A batch of 14 takes one hour to make, then Phil lets it cure for six weeks. “The harder you let the soap get, the longer the bar will last. For the average person, a soap bar will last about one month in the shower.”

Phil says people love the soaps because goat’s milk is really good for skin conditions. “If people have eczema or psoriasis – it is really good for these.”

Soaps and caretaking A friend in Taupo had a young girl with bad eczema.

Phil sent her a bar of tea tree soap. “The girl wouldn’t go to school without sleeves because she was so embarrassed about it. She tried it and within a week, it started to clear up. Within a fortnight, it had gone.”

The all-natural ingredients is also a huge drawcard for those striving to use products in which they know the ingredients – today a worldwide trend. “We also use natural packaging; just brown paper and a stamp. No printing etc.”

And with the soaps a side-hussle, Phil still has time to be caretaker of the property – where he lives with wife Carole in one side of the duplex, while their daughter Lee, son-in-law Logan and two teenage granddaughters Dakota and Tagan reside in the other.

The family grow their own potatoes, which keep them fed for six-odd months; vegetables from seed both outside and in an ingenious tin and clearlite home-made hothouse during winter, the fruit trees, and they eat their own meat, and eggs from the chooks and ducks.

“We haven’t bought meat for years. We also sell eggs at the gate when we have surplus.” Phil has a huge lone banana tree that produces bunches of the fruit all at once, which he freezes for baking, smoothies etc. And there are beehives on-site for pollination and honey.

And annually he receives a delivery of newborn lambs, which he rears for two weeks before selling on. So what’s behind the soap’s name Ruakiwi Homestead? “With most of my background being farming, one beef block I managed was called ‘Ruakiwi’. Plus, ‘Ruakiwi’ means to two kiwis – well, we have two Kiwi families living here, so it made sense,” says Phil, who enjoys his piece of paradise – caretaker role and all. “It’s worked out well; we love it here.”

Merle Cave

Country Life+Style Coast & Country News ˝

ˇ

˜˛˜˛ Country Life+Style Coast & Country News ˜°October, August, 2020 ˜˛°˝

Billy ‘Mushroom’ Roy

Photos: Daniel Hines

And his harmonious existence Standing in his self-built mushroom-growing room on his parents’ Whakamarama property, Billy Roy is worlds away from his former career in the film industry where he worked as a prop creator.

Growing mushrooms is Billy Roy’s full-time job.

“The film industry is incredibly wasteful – the main products we used were polystyrene, expanding foam... basically anything petrochemical.”

And it took a major toll on Billy’s health. “Working in film is just go, go, go. I became chronically fatigued,” says Billy, who is today known as Billy ‘Mushroom’ Roy. Five years ago, while working on a film in Australia, Billy developed heavy metal poisoning due to ongoing exposure to petrochemical materials. “It really hammered me. But, you can look at these things as curses, or blessings.

“For me, getting sick has been a great awareness raiser. I learned that coming back here, and doing something that feeds people and contributes to a harmonious existence, is the best thing for me.”

Growing mushrooms

Today he runs Marama’s Mushrooms on a small part of his parent’s 4.5 acre

HOMEOPATHIC FARM SERVICES

Kings Seeds Logo.pdf

1

4/07/13

8:52 AM

Kings Seeds Logo.pdf

1

4/07/13

8:52 AM

Whakamarama property, which is also home to two houses, about one acre of woodlands and a work-in-progress food forest planted five years ago. Much of his set-up, including a mushroom growing room, Billy built himself.

The food forest sparked Billy’s interest in fungi. “Through my study of mushrooms, I’ve realised that fungi play a massive part in our food’s nutrient density: plants give the fungi sugars, and in exchange the fungi will mine minerals to take back to the plant.

“We’ve only scraped the surface on what mushrooms can do for our health, and the soil’s health.”

Billy says going from a bag of substrate to edible oyster mushrooms takes about 19 days. Raw materials, including grain, are placed into a plastic bag and steamed to rid of competing bacteria.

Following an inoculation process, the 5kg bags are sealed and taken to an incubation room, which is kept warm enough to encourage spawn growth using a heat pump.

Once the bags are fully colonised, they are ready to sell. All customers have to do is cut a square into the bag, keep it in a sheltered area, and watch their mushrooms grow.

“You get a good first flush of

October, ˜˛˜˛ 2020 ˜° August, ˜˛°˝

Country Life+Style Coast & Country News ˘

“Through my study of mushrooms, I’ve realised that fungi play a massive part in our food’s nutrient density: plants give the fungi sugars, and in exchange the fungi will mine minerals to take back to the plant”

mushrooms, and any further flushes are a bonus,” says Billy.

“But, if you have some straw or woodchips in your garden and put the block in there, the mycelium (the thread-like vegetative part of the fungus) can spread, extending your yield of mushrooms.”

Before starting Marama’s Mushrooms, Billy sold formed oyster mushrooms at the Tauranga farmer’s market and a few outlets – but really, the mushroomgrowing was just a hobby.

At the brink of lockdown, he turned his hobby into a business selling growyour-own oyster mushroom blocks. And Marama’s Mushrooms rode the trend of people wanting to grow their own food during lockdown, selling 300 mushroom blocks in the first month.

“Selling blocks wasn’t the original plan, but it was a more viable option during lockdown. It was also much safer – the process means the bag’s contents is sanitary, and untouched.”

Planet-minded

When Billy’s parents built their Whakamarama home 25 years ago, they used recycled materials wherever they could – from all of the joinery to the kitchen benches. Their sustainable mindset seems to have passed on to Billy,

and is very much the philosophy of the property.

“Seven people live on the property, and we all follow the core ethics of permaculture: people care, earth care and fair share.”

Everything grown on the property is organic. “We fertilise with seaweed, carbon and biochar, and have chickens and ducks running around to help fertilise.

“The biggest challenge of being organic, and probably the biggest challenge for any mushroom grower, is flies.

“Having sticky fly traps and an electric insect killer where I grow mushrooms for the markets usually does the trick, but my next thing to try is frogs.”

Billy strives to make Marama’s Mushrooms as close to zero-waste as possible. “I’m trialling clay pots with lids as an alternative to plastic bags for growing the mushrooms in. So far the pots have worked well. They are more labour-intensive, but as long as mushrooms can grow in them I’ll happily make the switch, and set up a container swap system.

“I’d rather put in more work now than create more mess for future generations MacKenzie Dyer to clean up.”

SEE DEMO VIDEO ONLINE ZAGRODA BALE FEEDER HYD spin, unrolls bales eurohitch or 3 point linkage mount $4995 Inc GST

ZAGRODA SILAGE GRAB Euro Hitch mount 1.8 m wide, twin rams $4695 Inc GST

ZAGRODA BALE GRAB euro hitch, heavy duty self centering ,holds bale close $2795 Inc GST

ZAGRODA SQUARE BALE GRAB SIERRA BALE BALE FRAB euro hitch opens to 1.75m Free shipping euro hitch,Parallel arms open to Mainfreight depot $1995 Inc GST 0.6-2.1m .$4295 Inc GST

SIERRA PALLET FORKS EURO HITCH 2.5ton, adjustable 1.2m tines galv backrest $1695 Inc GST

3 FURROW RIDGER HO Furrow and weeder tines with suspensionon $2295 Inc GST

GRASSROL FERT SPREADER 1000L twin disc Galvanised Hopper Made in Poland $4995 Inc GST

MATENG MENASOR MULCHER 2.0m Cut , Rear door, side shift suit 45-95 HP $5295 Inc GST

NOVAQUIP 1.8m 3 LEG RIPPER adjustable 35x150mm legs 100x100x 9mm bar $2095 Inc GST

SEE DEMO VIDEO ONLINE SIERRA PTO FIREWOOD SAW 240mm cutting capacity tungsten tip blade ,CAT 1 $2595 Inc GST

Save $400

Made in Mexico

BISON SB 9-5 SUBSOILER 2.1m Wide frame,2.4 working 5 adjustable shanks, $5595 Inc GST

SEE DEMO VIDEO ONLINE

NOVAQUIP RIPPER PIPELAYER 32mm x150mm pointed leg 650 mm deep max 70mm pipe $1195 Inc GST

BISON NVHL300XHD GRADER BLADE 3m wide, Full HYD w/manual wheel, upto 160HP $10495 Inc GST

DELMORINO LEVANTE MULCHER 2.5m front or rear mounted, hammer flails ,suit 70-120HP $8995 inc GST

Over 200 Products available on our website, purchase online , shipping nation wide Call 0800 73 33 55

www.implementsdirect.co.nz

8

˜˛˜˛ Country Life+Style Coast & Country News ˜°October, August, 2020 ˜˛°˝