Workshop - Healthy Soil Healthy Plants, Saturday 5th April, 2 - 3:30pm

Join us on a journey into soil - its formation, the diverse life within it, and how to look after and nurture this precious life-giving resource. Koha. Please register on the Soil workshop page on our website.

Workshop - Inoculant to Compost with Gerry Gillespie and David Hardwick, Thursday 24th April,  2pm - 5pm

Join Australian experts Gerry Gillespie and David Hardwick for a workshop on how to brew and use inoculants, biostimulants, and hydrolysates to boost your compost, enhance soil health, and support regenerative food growing. Koha. Please register on the Inoculant to Compost workshop webpage.

Takatāpui māra hangout, Saturday 26 April, 11am - 2pm

This series of fun and dirty events will include hands on māra activities like weeding, harvesting and planting while having a chance for cute chats with like minded folks. Shared lunch too! Your host for the day will be local takatāpui māra fairy Tina Walker-Ferguson. This event is designed for takatāpui Māori, we also welcome Tagata Pasifika and BIPOC whānau. This is for a kaupapa Māori foremost. Please sign up by completing this form.

With daylight saving turning the clocks back one hour this Sunday morning, the evenings will be dark earlier, so our Thursday afternoon volunteer session will be solely composting from April 10th onwards, starting at the earlier time of 3pm (until 5pm). Mahi māra volunteering continues on Tuesday and Friday mornings 10am - 12pm. Register at https://kaicycle.org.nz/volunteer.

Kaicycle compost for your garden!

Time to refresh your māra after the summer crops? Winter kai going in the ground? Head to our website to order some of our lovely compost!

If you’re after compost for a school, marae or community garden, you can also request a compost donation here.

HotRot project update

With heavy hearts, we have made the incredibly tough decision to shut down our HotRot operation and site. While we were making great compost, despite our best efforts we couldn’t see a financially viable future for the operation, as was our goal. 

While we didn’t achieve our goals with this innovative project, we have learnt a great deal along the way, helping forge the path here in Pōneke and around Aotearoa toward localised organics and food systems that support community wellbeing and resilience. We will be selling the HotRot, and see great potential for it with a different site and model. 

We’re looking for a new tenant to move into the awesome Cairns Street Hub - if you know anyone looking for affordable warehouse and/or office space in Wellington City, please share our listing!

We’d like to share our enormous gratitude for all the funders, organisations and people who have supported this project. Together, we came a long way and learned a lot, and with changes made during the project, the core of Kaicycle Composting is in a stronger position going forward.

You can read more in our blog post.

Seed Saving Season

The start of ngahuru is proving a lovely time in the garden as we see our plants complete their natural cycles and we can do some seed saving! It's a great feeling to create our own seed stores, ready for spring with seeds that we know the whakapapa of - from plants that have been grown regeneratively and Hua Parakore. They are selected from the strongest plants that have acclimatised to our hyper-local environment. Seed saving is often the missing link in local food resilience. It enables our māra be closer to circular system, with fewer external inputs required. And it's often really easy!

Things like tomatoes and flowers are incredibly easy to save seeds from, so if you're lucky enough to have a māra of your own why not give it a go. We'd love to do some trading and seed swaps with other gardeners to help increase genetic diversity and ensure our crops are vigorous and flourishing. Edible Backyard has an excellent resource on saving tomato seeds if you want to give it a go!

Recently we have been saving seed from sunflowers, coriander, poppies, scabiosa, climbing beans, tomatoes (second generation Kaicycle seed!), sweet peas, lettuce, silverbeet, and oats.  We have an abundance of coriander seed so if you would like some to grow or cook with let us know!

Pataka Kai - The latest pukapuka from Dr Jessica Hutchings, (our Hua Parakore hero) brings together years of research, storytelling, and kaupapa Māori design. This is a response to the broken food systems, depleted soils and seeds that are owned by global corporations. It values indigenous perspectives and solutions that offer pathways to ecological, cultural and socio-economic sustainability as well as greater connection to food in our everyday lives. With examples of growing kai and seed, soil and food sovereignty, it's on our reading list and will be worth your reading time! https://www.masseypress.ac.nz/books/pataka-kai.