Kaicycle Pānui Noema | November Newsletter

Pānui Noema |
November Newsletter

Whaowhia te kete mātauranga

Fill the basket of knowledge

Kia ora koutou,

As you might know already, 2025 marks double digits for our Urban Farm at Hospital Rd. We’re turning 10! It’s a milestone we’re very proud of, and one that couldn’t have been achieved without the tireless mahi of many many staff and volunteers over the years.

Kaicycle is not only the lush green spot in the heart of Newtown that you know and love, it’s also thousands of hours of funding applications, governance meetings, problem solving, planning, fixing things that have broken and then fixing them again, reporting, budgeting, late nights and long days, and the immense amount of background work that goes into running a not-for-profit organisation. It’s the result of many brilliant brains and generous folk coming together to find different and better ways of doing things and working to create the world we want to see, and giving so much of their time and energy to do so. 10 years is a feat of people power and perseverance and that seems like something worth celebrating. You’ll find the details of our 10 year anniversary celebration below.

We also have a Community Open Day and Koha Workshop TOMORROW, 1st November - hope to see you there!

Ngā mihi, from the whole Kaicycle whānau

👀 In preparation for the event, we've been having fun going through some old photos from the early days of Kaicycle. It's cool to remind ourselves how far we've come, and how much the site has been transformed from bare land to thriving garden.

HUIHUINGA | EVENTS

Community Working Bee - tomorrow!

We’re super excited for our first Community Open Day of the season - we’ve got a working bee in the morning and a workshop on brewing beneficial microbes in the arvo - these are useful for your compost pile, and for foliar feeding your plants! Find out more and REGISTER for both sessions here.

Brew Your Own Beneficial Microbes KOHA workshop - tomorrow!

We’ve recently learnt how to make beneficial microbial brews from basic ingredients - join us for this koha workshop so we can practice making the base lactobacillus or ‘LAB’ brew (from rice, milk, molasses and water) and the ‘SPICE’ compost innoculant. We’ll talk about other brews you can make with the LAB base too. SPICE stands for 'Static Pile Inoculated Compost Extension', which means you can use this lovely brew to build a compost that doesn't need turning, which the beneficial fungi will love you for! Some of the other brews we'll talk about (like hydrolysate) can make great foliar sprays (to feed your plants through their leaves) and soil amendment

Please register using the link on our volunteering page: www.kaicycle.org.nz/volunteer.

Kaicycle Turns 10!

Sunday 16th November, 2pm - 5pm

We're very excited to share in celebrating 10 years of Kaicycle with you! Full details can be found at the event page on our website. Please make sure to RSVP by emailing event@kaicycle.org.nz if you would like to attend!

MAHI AROHA | VOLUNTEER

Seeking volunteer trapper

One of our awesome trapping volunteers is heading overseas so we’re looking for someone new to help us do our part for our native birds and check the rat-traps at our urban farm. This is a network of 7 traps that you’d be checking monthly. If you’re interested and want to know more, flick us an email at community@kaicycle.org.nz.

Summer volunteer times

We’re bringing back after work volunteering!

With daylight savings upon us and summer just around the corner, we’re reintroducing our evening volunteer sessions. This year we will be hosting a new session on Tuesdays between 5pm - 7pm, and changing the time of the Thursday afternoon session to 4.30pm - 7pm - feel free to drop in at whatever time suits you for this one! A perfect way to wind down from work, these sessions will leave you feeling peaceful and enriched. Sign up for volunteer sessions here.

MAHI WAIRĀKAU | COMPOSTING

Treat your māra to the best compost on the block (according to the worms)

Prepare your garden beds for kōanga / Spring and give your new seeds the best start in life, by getting your hands on the last of our premium compost. This compost was processed in our HotRot machine and left to mature outdoors for a total of 8 months - so it's full of nutrients, microbes, fungi, worms and mauri.

It’s made from the food scraps we collect from businesses and residences around Wellington, wood mulch from arborists and donated coffee chaff from Coffee Supreme & L’Affare. It’s also bagged up in reused grain sacks from Garage Project, which we encourage you to return afterwards for further reuse. Available at $25 for a 40 litre bag. See our website for more info and to place an order or pick up a bag during our Community Open Day. There’s about a dozen bags left, so get in before it runs out!

We’ve got a new toy!

As part of our goal to continue producing the best compost around, we’ve invested in a moisture meter. Seeing as our compost boxes are 1.2m x 1.2m x 1.2m, it’s pretty hard to tell how dry/wet it is in the middle, bottom and sides. To date, we’ve been relying on doing ‘the squeeze test’ at the top of the compost pile. As the name implies, this involves squeezing a bit of compost in the palm of your hand and seeing how much liquid comes out (if any). If it’s dripping a lot, it’s too wet; if there are no drips and hardly any liquid left on your glove, too dry; but if there’s a drip or two, perfect.

Now, we’re able to gauge levels of moisture in cross-sections by slowly pushing the stem through the compost, which means we have more information about its needs: whether it needs more water, more air, and when it needs to be turned next.

Lost & found again, a Kaicyclist’s Tale

It began with the forging of an e-bike battery. For within this battery, was bound the strength to govern each Kaicyclist on their weekly food scrap collection shift. After a long day of ranging the city, something happened that the cyclist did not intend. The battery abandoned the cyclist. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two weeks, the battery passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, a conscious Wellingtonian spotted the precious battery on the side of the road. They took up this burden, resisted its pull, and exclaimed, “I will take it! I will take the battery to Kaicycle!”

They summoned strangers from distant lands, on the Hataitai Help Facebook page. Ryan the Wise, our friend and ally from Switched On Bikes, was among them. And so, after elevenses, luncheon and afternoon tea, the Fellowship of the Battery embarked on an honorable and treacherous journey. Over the Mountains of Victoria and through the forests of pine, they carried the precious battery -which seemed to be increasingly heavy- and returned it to its rightful place in the Farms of Kaicycle. Peace was restored to the realm of Pōneke.

ĒTAHI KAWE PŪRONGO | Other news

The Gene Technology Bill - where are we at?

The Health Select Committee has recently released their report on the Gene Technology Bill, recommending it is passed and advancing it to the next stage. Organics Aotearoa New Zealand (OANZ) is in the process of reviewing the report and recommending next steps to make sure this risky Bill is not passed. You can keep up to date with progress and OANZ recommendations here.

Mangaroa Farms Open Day

Mangaroa Farms in Upper Hutt is hosting their 2025 open day on Saturday 1st of November. This is an awesome opportunity to see a larger scale regenerative agriculture project in action and get your hands on beautiful organically produced meat and vegetables from the Wellington Region.

MAHI MĀRA | Crop talk - On the farm

Back in August three of our Kaicycle staff (Rose, Ellie, and Hannah) had the immense privilege of attending the Earthworkers 101 course run by For the Love of Bees with the generous support of Wellington City Council. It was an amazing week of full on, science based, learning that was super relevant to the mahi we do - regenerative urban farming. It was also a great opportunity to connect with other people doing similar mahi in our region, and beyond. Transforming our local food system is going to take a network of practitioners and courses like this help us connect and upskill to tackle this essential work as a collective. Now we’ve had a bit of time for our learnings to percolate, (or decompose if you will…) we wanted to share some key concepts that you could employ in your own māra. One of the lightbulb moments for me was the idea that we haven’t really seen plants growing at their genetic potential - how wild is that. Our soil systems are so degraded that our plants aren’t getting what they need to be the best they can be. They’re growing to the potential that their environment offers, but what if we could improve that environment…..

Microbes in the soil are what feed our plants. They make nutrients available and ensure that plants are getting the right balance of nutrients. First things first - don’t kill them! Using pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are all extremely destructive to the soil micro-biome so don’t use them. The same goes for fertilisers. Secondly, add things to your soil that will boost your micro-biome levels e.g. living compost, biological brews, innoculating seeds and seedlings with beneficial microbes and Mycorrhizal fungi.
Diversity of plants on the surface = diversity of microbes in the soil = healthier soil. If you can’t fit diversity into the same bed at the same time, diversify over time e.g. planting a mixed cover-crop in between planting your next mono-crop.
Maximise your biomass! All plants photosynthesise and through this process generate sugar. Most of this sugar goes into the soil to feed microbes. More plants = more photosynthesis = more micro organisms. Yay!
Microbes are the immune system of the soil - we must look after them at all cost. Microbes have amazing ways of communicating with each other. They know who else is sharing the soil with them and who their friends and enemies are. When you’ve got lots of friendly microbes the communicate with each other and turn on beneficial behaviours that we don’t see if there aren’t enough of them! So your soil might just be waiting for the critical mass of good microbes to be reached for the soil ecosystem to really take off.

And so much more. If you're keen to learn more and want to nerd out with us about the wonders of soil, come along to one of our volunteer sessions, workshops, or events!

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With thanks to our supporters.