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You Are What You Eat
Jim recalls his move from living on ciggies, energy drinks and fast food to appreciating the power of good food, and understanding how life-changing it is to be able to grow, and share, your own produce.
Jim recalls his move from living on ciggies, energy drinks and fast food to appreciating the power of good food, and understanding how life-changing it is to be able to grow, and share, your own produce.
I was once a night shift manager at a burger joint, fueling my every day with beef burgers, cigarettes and Redbull. I was in my early 20s and, while I knew that stuff wasn’t great for me, I wasn’t really
that concerned about putting it into my body.
A few years later, you would have found me restocking the fresh produce section at our local
organic store, Be Organics. Another couple of years on, you would’ve found me actually growing
said produce at a local organic farm! I was preparing the soil, and planting the seeds and seedlings, then picking, processing, packing and pushing fruit and vegetables off to that very same organic store, amongst others.
I’m not saying that I’ve completely converted to consuming organic food. For me, it’s more about
the journey from a place of complete disregard, to slowly learning more about what we humans
eat and how that food affects our bodies and our minds. I’ve become intrigued by the substances that sustain us, and the nutrients that nourish us. After all, we are what we eat, right?
Consider these words from the late Dr Bernard Jensen, a Californian that believed that nutrition
is the single greatest treatment for holistic human healing. “The basic idea to remember, for our health’s sake, is that we are made of the minerals and trace elements present in the soil, and unless the foods we eat are grown from rich, fully mineralised soil, our bodies will become deficient in one
or more essential chemical elements, and we will become vulnerable to disease.”
At the organic farm, this is something we strived to achieve in growing our produce. We wanted
to provide our local customers with fruit and vegetables that were as nutrient-dense as possible.
I’ve come to see that plants have the ability to mine nutrients and minerals from the soil to build themselves up in good health. Their roots sift through the soil, seeking out what they need for optimal growth. The more diversity in the soil means that plants can pull from a larger variety of nutrients
and minerals to grow strong and healthy. The more rich and fertile the soil, the better quality the vegetation.
From there, it’s into the puku of animals, including us humans. Just like plants sending out roots
into the soil, it would benefit us to seek out the best, most nutritious foods to nourish ourselves, making us happy and healthy.
A big part of being an organic market farmer in the Bay of Plenty is having a stall at the Tauranga Farmers Market, held rain, hail or shine every Saturday at Tauranga Primary School. This is where local producers from all over the wider Bay of Plenty area gather to proudly display their hard work.
A stallholder prerequisite is to produce everything you sell. This usually means that everything is super fresh, being harvested and packed the day before. Fresh produce starts to lose nutritional value as soon as it’s picked, so the fresher produce, the more nutritious it is for us when we consume it.
Compare this to bulk-bought produce in a big supermarket, where it might’ve been harvested before it’s fully ripe and delicious, and spent days in transit. Sometimes it even travels from abroad, being exposed to chemicals, gases or waxes used to preserve food for long-distance transport. This can
all lower a fresh food’s nutritional value. If you buy local produce, then what you’re buying (and supporting) is seasonal produce. Food that is grown with our seasons — and it usually sits around the same price, or maybe even less, as the produce found in the grocery stores but it will most likely taste way better and be loads more nourishing. Buying from the growers at markets also means you meet the faces behind your food, and find out how they go about growing or making their goods.
Nowadays, even though I no longer work on the farm, I’m still putting the skills I learnt into
practice, growing things to eat and sharing with the people around me, and helping others to do
the same. There’s something very satisfying about growing your own food and, dare I say, it’s also quite addictive!
I recently had the pleasure of attending Crop Swap Tauranga, held in the beautiful Bethlehem Community Gardens (pictured at top). What I found was a group of fellow backyard growers that meet up on the last Sunday morning of each month to not only share homegrown produce, but other goodies like seeds, seedlings, pots, worm farm juice, along with tips, tricks, observations and general enthusiasm. No money changes hands, you simply bring a little and take a little. Anything leftover gets donated to the Community Gardens (run by Good Neighbour).
I can see my future being filled with these types of things. I dream of neighbours, and even whole streets of people, growing food and crop swapping; every neighbourhood with a community garden as a place to learn how to grow and share top-quality fresh produce. Because turning a $3 pack of lettuce seeds into, potentially, hundreds of heads of fresh, nutrient-dense lettuce, just by taking a little time and consideration, is absolutely life changing. Especially when a single head at the supermarket these days is rolling out the door at 7 buckaroonies!
Where to buy local organic produce in the BOP
Be Organics, 6 Tawa St, Mt Maunganui
@cropswaptauranga
Good Food Market, 35 MacDonald St, Mt Maunganui
luxorganics.co.nz
Plum Organics, 2/22 Gravatt Rd, Pāpāmoa
Simply Organic, 771 Cameron Rd, Tauranga
Battle of the bugs
In Spring, everything wakes up and gets busy, and that includes a population boom for slugs
and snails! Here’s a few tips to help protect your garden:
Keep your seedlings well fed Healthy seedlings will have more chance of surviving. A top dressing compost, liquid seaweed brews, worm farm juice etc applied monthly should do the trick.
Neem & pyrethrum Regular foliar applications [ie applied to the leaves] of diluted neem and pyrethrum extracts during the early stages growth is a great way of avoiding insect damage before
it starts to happen.
Beer! Place bowls of beer in problem areas. The beer attracts slugs and snails away from your
plants, where they will most likely drown in a drunken bliss. Also, a bowl with filled slugs and
snails attracts birds, and having birds hanging around your garden is an excellent defence against soft-bodied pest insects.
For more gardening content, follow Jim
@gardennearsy @homefarm
By Jim Annear
Photography by ilk
