Outside the Box

“Let’s do some herb smelling!” Nina Henderson says to the Omanu School kids who are gathering around. “Can you tell me what this is?” she asks, holding up a vibrant leaf. “Basil!” answers a chorus of voices.

“And what did we make with basil?” she asks.

“Ice cream!” someone shouts, with the rest of the group chiming in:

“It was so good.”

“It was delicious.”

“Lots of people hated it!”

Nina smiles at the answers, “Yes, it was unusual. And we made pesto too, remember?”

Nina is a facilitator from PiPS (People & Plants in Schools), an interschool collective that oversees
the gardens at seven schools around the Mount and Pāpāmoa. Today she’s in the Omanu garden with a lively bunch of year 3 and 4 students.

We’re down the side of the school hall, inspecting the herb garden that Nina and the children have planted. “Smell this,” a student says, offering up some fragrant lemon balm. Sage is being sniffed, coriander being munched. A praying mantis is being paraded around on someone’s hand, rosemary is being stuffed into a shirt pocket.

Nina’s responsible for the school programme, educating tamariki on how to grow their own food: readying the soil, planting, harvesting, tasting and regularly cooking. There’s lots of research
showing the positive effect school gardens can have on everything from mental health and nutrition to academic achievement, and today we’re getting to see the student’s enthusiasm and knowledge first hand.

We follow the group to the main garden, which is currently being prepared for the winter months
— it’s an impressive cluster of raised beds with a load of different plants, such as cauliflower and kale. Nina draws the students’ attention to the flourishing kūmara patch with its mass of lush foliage, and encourages them to push back the leaves and gently dig around to show us the soon-to-be harvested vegetables. “We grew the kūmara for the school hangī last year,” says a student proudly.

Nina points out 11 new feijoa trees lining the school fence, with a row of dwarf mandarin trees alongside. One day the students will be able to help themselves to the fruit. Other recent garden projects have involved setting up a worm farm and utilising the resulting compost, and skewering little white plastic butterflies (they made from milk bottles) around the organic garden, in an attempt to scare off the real ones, which are territorial. “With kids, it’s also a fun thing to find the caterpillars and pick them off — at St Thomas More’s garden last week, we had 144!” says Nina.

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The students lead the way to Omanu’s sentinel garden, where they give the plants a quick inspection. PiPS has partnered with Tauranga Moana biosecurity so all its schools have one of these kiwifruit-bin-turned-planter-boxes with plants designed to attract any new, unwanted arrivals to the area (from
the port or elsewhere). Trouble might come in the form of the brown marmorated stink bug that could decimate the kiwifruit orchards, or the fungal disease myrtle rust. The project is designed to give an early warning to the horticulture industry.

The nearby shadehouse has a flower-filled pollination garden and shelves of seedlings, such as marigold, broccoli, silverbeet, and swan plants that are destined to be munched by monarch caterpillars. There are also some rather special harakeke (flax) plants that are part of the Mauao Regeneration Project, which sees PiPS students collect seeds from the maunga, germinate them
back at their schools, then return to Mauao for a planting day. “The Mauao ranger Josh Clark is coming in today to see if ours are big enough,” says Nina.

“I like that you get to see lots of insects. And it also inspired me to help out my grandma at home.”
– Harriet Fahey

“I like being out and about, I like harvesting, I like getting my hands dirty, but I don’t like washing them [holds up his muddy hands and smiles].”
– Alex Robinson

A seed is planted

In 2017, Ali Teo and Heidi Hughes started PiPS at Arataki and Tahatai Coast schools when it became apparent that the schools’ gardening clubs, with their reliance on volunteers and teachers, weren’t able to function smoothly when everyone got too busy.

The interschool collective introduced paid facilitators to run the gardens. They would teach kids to grow and maintain fruit and vege gardens using organic principles, to care for the environment and to prepare food. The students took their learnings, enthusiasm and kai back home to their whānau, and positive changes were seen across the board.

Word soon spread to other schools about the inspiring PiPS programme.

“At the time, all the principals got together once a week, so they started coming to Arataki and Tahatai for meetings,” says Clare Rodgers, PiPS manager. “Other teachers came along too, and
they all saw the changes the garden had made to the school.”  

Five other schools were gradually brought on board: Omanu, Mount Intermediate, St Thomas More, Suzanne Aubert and Te Manawa ō Pāpāmoa. PiPS now has three part-time facilitators: Nina, Maeve Henihan and Leela Woodgate, and was recently recognised at the Western Bay Community Awards with the Sustainable Futures Award.

“We have kids that don’t necessarily fit the sports or arts programmes, but they find their place
in the garden,” says Clare. “Many of those kids have a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose that they probably haven’t had in school before.

“It’s also their time being a real kid, getting dirty, getting mucky, just exploring,” she explains.
“There are rules but it’s not always a teaching experience. We just let them go — play, touch and
feel. They are learning from that.”

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The PiPS team see the students gain life skills that they take beyond the school grounds. “The kids go home and teach their parents about the garden. Parents tell me the kids have started eating broccoli, kale, kohlrabi — different stuff,” says Clare. “We had a kid at Tahatai who grew a carrot — he built a fence around it! He never ate carrots but now he loves them, and the family grows them at home.” Clare also proudly talks about their tamariki that take across skills to Mount College’s junior gardening club, with many progressing on to take the school’s horticultural course.

Kai carts sit out the front of some of the member schools, where leftover produce is on offer for anyone to help themselves. Clare says school parents and the wider community are welcome to
take what they need from the school gardens, as long as there’s enough left for the students.

The Lottery Grant Board, TECT and BayTrust are major funders of PiPS, and the schools contribute 18%. “We try to keep it down,” says Clare, who also drives fundraising. “We have some schools that aren’t with the programme as they can’t afford it.”

She says the biggest challenge is funding wages and sometimes equipment too. “At the moment,
all of our schools are needing irrigation, ranging in cost from $1000 to $8000 and that’s including bores. We’re also looking at rain tanks.”

Clare acknowledges that many parents and community businesses have been very generous,
name-checking Bunnings Mount Maunganui and Mitre 10 Pāpāmoa. “Sometimes parents drop off potting mix, compost or mulch by the shed — just something to help. If the community is on board, the programme runs a lot more efficiently.”‍

pipsbop.org

Words by Sarah Nicholson
Photography by ilk

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