Edible streets

🍌 Bananas Available at the Edible Streets Pantry 🌿

Kia ora whānau,
Come and grab some bananas that have been kindly dropped off through a food rescue and placed in our Edible Streets pantry for the community to enjoy.

📍 85 Ottawa Road

Help yourself while they’re available. 🍌💚
Big thanks to everyone involved in rescuing good food and helping share it through the community. 🌱

Today was cold and windy, but that didn't stop Edible Streets founder and coordinator Zane Crofts from getting out in the garden. After preschool, his oldest son Luca came along to help Dad finish the day's work. 🌱

Together, they extended our propagation mother bed by another few metres, adding blackcurrants and cannas to the collection.

Blackcurrants are a productive perennial food crop, while cannas are an excellent biomass plant that can produce large amounts of organic matter for mulch and compost. Their flowers are also loved by pollinators, making them a valuable addition to food forests.

By growing each species in its own block within the mother bed, we can easily harvest cuttings, divisions, tubers, or rhizomes for propagation. This helps us efficiently produce more plants for the nursery, allowing us to supply community groups with food and beneficial plants for future projects.

Every metre added today means more plants, more education, and more resilient communities tomorrow. 🌿

A huge thank you to Bunnings Warehouse Shirley for supporting our community food forest project with a generous donation of berry plants!

Yesterday we planted our new berry bed with 5 plants each of: 🍓 Raspberry 🍓 Boysenberry 🍓 Loganberry 🍓 Jewel Berry

These berries will not only provide future harvests for the community, but will also become a valuable source of cuttings that we can propagate through our nursery next year. This helps us grow even more plants for community projects and educational opportunities across Canterbury.

Every plant donated today helps create a more abundant, resilient future tomorrow.

Thank you, Bunnings Shirley, for helping us grow food, knowledge, and community! 🌱💚

GrowLocal BunningsShirley Canterbury

Yesterday we got our new pallet bay built and ready to start loading with potting mix for the nursery 🌱

We also had a great day with our amazing regular volunteer Anita, who has been a driving force behind Edible Streets since we started at the Climate Action Campus.

Anita's youngest son, Rocko, joined in as well, having plenty of fun with Zane's oldest son, Luca. The boys spent much of the day playing, exploring, and helping out around the nursery.

One of their jobs was helping dig out grass to extend one of our berry beds. This will give us more space to grow mother plants that we can propagate from next year, helping us supply even more food and beneficial plants to community projects across Christchurch.

It's always great seeing the next generation getting their hands dirty, learning where food comes from, and being part of building something that benefits the whole community.

A huge thank you to Anita, Rocko, Luca, and everyone who continues to support Edible Streets 🌿

Big day at Edible Streets today 🌱

We cleared out a compost pile that had been sitting right in the middle of what is now our second nursery extension space. The pile was made up of leaves dropped around the nursery, w**ds, and mixed organic material collected and slowly composted over the past year.

After a long, slow breakdown process, it became beautiful microbial-rich compost full of life — what you could really call “black gold”.

In collaboration with Canterbury Permaculture Institute , we spread this compost across the front half of their hugelkultur beds to help kick-start soil biology and accelerate system development from the ground up. The back half of the bed is still bare lifeless topsoil awaiting coverage, which makes a clear contrast in the photo between living soil and raw soil still to be built.

These beds will now be cover cropped while the system continues to develop and stabilise.

Eventually, this space will be planted out with fruit tree guilds 🌳

A guild is a plant community designed to support a central fruit tree. Instead of planting just one tree, you build a small ecosystem around it. This can include nitrogen fixers, ground covers, herbs, flowers, mulch plants, and dynamic accumulators. Each species plays a role—feeding soil life, improving fertility, attracting beneficial insects, suppressing w**ds, and helping the whole system function as a resilient, self-supporting system.

Slow, living systems building food resilience and soil health together 🌿

🌿 Great collaborative working bee this Sunday in the Climate Action Campus Red Zone food forest! 🌱

Edible Streets worked together with the Canterbury Permaculture Institute to help restore and maintain the overgrown food forest areas the are now caring for.

Together we worked on w**d whacking and mulching around the food forest systems to help suppress w**ds, improve access, and support the long-term health of the site 🌳

This collaboration has been growing over recent months through shared projects and working bees between Edible Streets and the Canterbury Permaculture Institute.

Previously, we worked together on building the hugelkultur beds at the front of the food forest, combining resources and labour to create long-term regenerative growing systems.

The Canterbury Permaculture Institute crew have also been helping support Edible Streets working bees, including assisting with the development of our new rootstock propagation beds for future nursery production 🌱

As part of this ongoing partnership, we’ve also teamed up to help tidy and organise the shared nursery space between the Climate Action Campus, Ōtautahi, the Canterbury Permaculture Institute, and the Edible Streets nursery.

It’s awesome seeing different community groups working together, sharing knowledge, tools, labour, and space to help strengthen regenerative food systems across Ōtautahi 🌏

Big thanks to everyone who came out and contributed 💚

Edible Streets – Growing Communities, One Garden at a Time 🌻

🌿 Exciting collaboration happening between Edible Streets and the Climate Action Campus! 🌱

We’ve recently finished building a new rootstock stool bed in the Edible Streets syntropic food forest, doubling the size of our existing propagation system for future apple and pear rootstock production 🍎🍐

Unfortunately, due to limited funding this year, we haven’t been able to purchase more rootstocks yet. Orders for this season have already closed, so we’ll now be planning to order new rootstocks next summer for planting in winter next year.

Rather than letting the bed sit unused, the Climate Action Campus students will now be using the space as a vegetable garden in the meantime 🌱

This creates a really positive outcome for everyone:
✔ The students get more growing space and hands-on learning opportunities
✔ The bed stays biologically active and productive
✔ Vegetable crops help suppress twitch and other invasive w**ds
✔ It saves us from having to do a massive labour-intensive w**d removal before planting the stool bed next year

It’s a great example of collaborative land use — keeping soil covered, building community involvement, and making sure every part of the food forest stays active and useful while longer-term systems develop 🌏

Big thanks to the Climate Action Campus crew for working alongside us and helping grow a stronger regenerative community network in Ōtautahi 💚

Edible Streets – Growing Communities, One Garden at a Time 🌻

🌿 Productive day in the Edible Streets syntropic food forest today! 🫐🌱

Today Edible Streets coordinator Zane and his oldest son Luca worked on building a new blueberry bed in our subtropical syntropic food forest at the Climate Action Campus.

We dug out the grass layer, then mixed a 50/50 blend of compost and the existing topsoil to create a rich growing bed for our blueberry plants. The bed was also raised around 100mm to improve drainage and create healthier long-term growing conditions for the blueberries.

These blueberry plants have been planted as future mother plants so we can take cuttings from them next year and continue propagating more edible plants for the nursery and future community projects 🌱

Next stage will be mulching the bed with pine needles to help retain moisture and create the acidic fungal-rich environment blueberries love 🍄🌲

We were also joined by some awesome kids from the Climate Action Campus, Ōtautahi home base class, Tane Mahuta 🌿. Luca really enjoyed making new friends and spending the day gardening together.

Big thank you as well to Southern Woods Tree Nursery for generously donating the blueberry plants to help support the project 💚

We are building a living ecosystem inside the food forest that supports ongoing propagation — creating strong mother plants that will supply future nursery stock and help establish new community growing projects across Ōtautahi 🌏

Edible Streets – Growing Communities, One Garden at a Time 🌻