Impact Projects (November 2024)
What is an impact project?
As Blue Borage, I often get asked for my thoughts on how to tackle really big problems, things that city councils and governments research. Often I see a really simple solution, something based on common sense or biodynamic methodologies, and people look at me like I'm out of touch with reality.
My only strategy in the face of this skepticism is to prove it works.
And so, I have a stack of research projects that gently tick along in the background of my normal business operations, each one solving a very expensive problem through means of a very logical solution.
My hope is that I can provide just enough support for society to go 'aha!!!' that's what's needed, and stop funding very expensive engineers and PhD programmes to carry out research that is just not working.
The problem with my approach is that there are too many interesting problems, and not enough time to work on all of them.
Here's the top 12 as at November 22nd, in the order that Blue Borage followers, customers and collaborators have ranked them
The top three
Garden Club for students whose educational facility doesn't (yet) have a workplace edible garden or composting system in place
Supporting water health of the Manukau Harbour with biodynamic composting (reducing harmful nitrates leaching into groundwater)
Soil Stories: event waste composting
The next six
Indoor composting: apartment friendly worm farms and container gardening
Supporting water health of a culvert / drain in an industrial suburb of Auckland
Holistic weed management at St Leonards Playcentre in Dunedin
Citizen science: leaf mould compost
Holistic weed management in Tuakau's Pā Harakeke in Centennial Park
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Citizen science: wild ginger worm castings
The bottom three
Railway pollinator garden behind the Tuakau Museum
My beloved Dahlia flower garden, spray free since October 2022.Holistic weed management at Whangarata Community Hall
Creative use of Harakeke (NZ Flax)
I'll add more detail about each project in the next few weeks. (This is a sort of 'living document')
Soil Stories: event waste composting
Events where food is served is too often a space with a lot of food waste going to landfill. Somehow there's a gap between the hosts, the venue, the caterers, the event manager and the guests. Most of us compost at home, but somehow at work we follow instructions and don't question the systems in someone else's space. Right?
How do we change this, and make the change fun?
With storytelling. And getting the soil back to the venue so there's a fully circular, closed loop, and perhaps a new relationship with a local soil maker.Garden Club for students whose educational facility doesn't (yet) have a workplace edible garden or composting system in place
Talking about composting, gardening and food resilience, people are often quick to suggest that schools should be teaching this. What about universities, where both the staff and the students are adults?
Too often tertiary education providers look like corporate spaces devoid of nature based, common sense waste management.
And what's really interesting is that there's a wave of students asking for this to change. Blue Borage is here to help!Supporting water health of the Manukau Harbour with biodynamic composting (reducing harmful nitrates leaching into groundwater)
This project is inspired by the commercial growers surrounding my home in Tuakau. Wherever I drive, I see weeds sprayed with glyphosate and large monoculture crop growing. It's depressing.
Even more depressing is this report from GNS, measuring the nitrates from excessive fertiliser use trickling down into the groundwater and out to the Manukaua Harbour, affecting the quality of water. It's a really serious issue.
I've spoken to the water specialist mentioned in this article, and her advice is to contact Horticulture NZ, and help educate the growers on how to reduce their chemical usage.Indoor composting: apartment friendly worm farms and container gardening
This is a fun project, in response to a sarcastic comment on LinkedIn about how my work is only for those with a garden, and that modern living is apartments and small townhouses. I responded to this by challenging myself to compost food scraps inside my tiny little granny flat. I've now got my daughter in Sydney testing out a couple of methods, and have a whole stack of ideas on how the composting community can help minimise lots of compost barriers.Supporting water health of a culvert / drain in an industrial suburb of Auckland
You know that feeling of seeing something that needs to be fixed, and not being able to 'unsee' it?
There's a drain in Auckland close to one of my clients, and every time I go there I'm reminded of an unspoken promise to help this waterway.Citizen science: leaf mould compost
What qualities do various trees give in their leaves? What's the optimal use of leaf mould from a range of trees? I'm looking for a few people to make leaf mould from just one tree, and test out the leaf mould in a range of settings.Citizen science: wild ginger worm castings
I've got a neat solution for solving the problem of wild ginger, one of our most invasive pest plants. It's using worm farms to munch through the ginger - just the ginger. The first batch of worm castings is ready, and feels heavenly, kind of like the quality of ginger itself: cooling, refreshing, healing.
How should this be used, and is there a commercial application that could see wild ginger become a resource worthy of removing from our forest areas - so worthwhile that we can pay people to go dig it up, and never spray it with water-polluting herbicides ever again?Holistic weed management in Tuakau's Pā Harakeke in Centennial Park
In case it's not obvious to all, I'm obsessed with Raranga (Māori weaving), and the Harakeke plant often called NZ Flax. Right in the middle of Tuakau there is a Pā Harakeke (Flax plantation), and while the local weavers make good use of the plants, they are all busy aunties, and don't have time to keep up with the weed management. I would love for the Waikato District Council to support the art form that is Raranga by making this a spray-free park, with hot composting demonstrated to keep all these weeds on-site, but turned into biodynamic compost that feeds the Harakeke plants without smothering them.
The Harakeke collection has national significance, in that a local Tuakau farmer (Buckley Fyers) travelled around collecting specimens of a wide range of Flax plants, to help the local weavers have access to the full range of cultivars available. This collection was used to start the Pā Harakeke at the Auckland Botanic Gardens.Holistic weed management at Whangarata Community Hall
Just down the road from where I live, this is a quaint old school building now used by the local community. There are all the usual weeds, and all the usual sprays used to manage them. I was teaching edible gardening workshops here over the winter of 2022, but stopped when I realised the extent of glyphosate usage.Holistic weed management at St Leonards Playcentre in Dunedin
Dunedin City Council are amazing - they not only started a food scrap collection for all residents, but allow garden waste in the same bins. Sadly, they cannot accept flax leaves or cabbage tree leaves, so the Playcentre where I take little Hazel when I'm down in Dunedin is sending this garden waste to landfill. EEEEK!!!!
These plants are simple to compost, and I'd like to help them remotely.Railway pollinator garden behind the Tuakau Museum
Creative use of Harakeke (NZ Flax)
I have been doing Raranga (Māori weaving) studies with Te Wānanga o Aotearoa in 2024, and am mesmerised by the potential for this plant to be incorporated in our gardens, with woven structures for plant cloches, compost enclosures, plant pots, seedling trays and so much more.
JANUARY 2025 UPDATES
Here's here things are at so far:
1) Garden club for students of educational institutions that don't yet compost.
- My classmate at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa who wants to start a maara kai brought seeds to our final weekend of weaving and we had a beautiful seed-sowing session, I now have boxes of food growing. She was called out of town for family reasons, and the two invitations I extended to others in the class had minimal response. It's holiday season, we'll pick this up in the new year.
- Based on the high votes for this topic, I've gone above and beyond to help the teachers at Tipene St Stephen's boarding school in Bombay to divert their food scraps from landfill, make soil, and learn to plant seeds. This may become the site for a future garden club gathering space.
2) Water Health (Manukau)
- Compost workshop scheduled for January 18th in Kingseat.
- Tears of frustration when talking with public officials on water health. They don't get it. They know it's an urgent matter, but I suspect they also realise it's an expensive problem to fix. I'm blending all the water related projects into one bundle this month, and need to find the allies who are making more progress than me.
3) Soil Stories
- SUCCESS!! I dropped soil to Tipene School and they bought 8 buckets for teachers to use, I've now done 6 food scraps pick-ups, and have the finished soil going back to the school. It's an amazing case study here. But it's outside of their strategic plan, and there's no budget for it. It's a case of needing to act swiftly when the opportunity presents itself - once the boarders arrive, they are going to be in 100% teaching mode, so the holidays are the time to create a culture of composting within the faculty that will be picked up by the boys as just how things are done at the school.
- The Kitchen Project in Auckland want to talk about how to develop the concept further - their 'Eat Street' compost is now in two worm farms here at the soil farm, not far from maturity.
4) Indoor Composting
- New experiment begun, using the top tier of the Pacha compost pots as an indoor planter, with foliage spilling out over the side.
- This is a big focus for 2025 - I will be talking with interior decorators & architects to explore how we can get composting designed into more indoor spaces.
- A new colleague in Canada has offered to look into a partnership, to promote his indoor worm farm solution globally.
5) Water Health, Sylvia Park
- On hold for the holidays, but this will blend with other areas of work in a remarkable way, I suspect.
6) St Leonard's playcentre
- They've written to accept my offer to help, but we need to wait till mid 2025, as their organisational structure is going through a change process. They loved the idea, so that's a great start. (Note: Grant Robertson lives just up the road, will be driving past this venue twice a day as he travels to work at Otago University)
7) Leaf Mould
- SUCCESS!! An amazing workshop at the Auckland Botanic Gardens, and the offer to promote the project within their Edibles space, I need to figure out what to put in their noticeboard, alongside the enormous posters from Auckland Council with their food waste fairy telling us to put food scraps on a truck bound for Ecogas in Reporoa.
8) Tuakau's Paa Harakeke
- SUCCESS!! An amazing meeting with two of my weaving classmates, three people from the Auckland Botanic Garden, the Waikato District Council's Community Led Development Advisor, a shared lunch in the park, examination of the historical records at the museum, a weeding & harvesting session, and the commitment to continue to engage with the community stakeholders.
- Next steps: meet with the WDC parks people in January, and once Pauline Herangi is back from Sydney late January, figure out how the local marae wants to lead this. (I have a big green light to weed and tidy as much as I like - the signage and weaving will be Māori led)
9) Wild Ginger worm castings
- Parallel plant trials underway.
- Soil making happening inside, I think I'll be able to remove all the wild ginger from the grounds of the Whangarata Community Hall this month.
10) Museum Pollinator Garden
- Photoshoot planned for late January.
- Dahlia season has begun.
- It's the 150th anniversary for the Tuakau Hotel this year, which could be a good motivation for them to come on board and extend the pollinator garden to the roadside.
11) Whangarata Hall
- Leaf mould brought back to the soil farm
- Tradescantia compost brought back to the soil farm
- In the process of letting this one go
12) Creative Harakeke
- On the back burner, I'm making lots of baskets and mats to pass out to the owners of Harakeke plants, to help raise awareness of how Flax is used as a fibre.
- Harakeke Hot compost made 1/12/24, then turned 27/12/24, already seeing some great insights.
- Attended meeting at Tipene school about their agricultural curriculum, met some people from MPI who work with Māori led innovation, and have the business card of someone who told me my work is really important. Perhaps this project will be something for the new students at Tipene to research.