Stephen Blyth's Blog

Quite by accident when looking for lunch while on a rambling walk along the Otumoetai foreshore in Tauranga, Roz and I tripped over the fabulous, fecund Let’s get growing community gardens. Sited in the Otumoetai Railway Reserve, the allotment style gardens are a vision of paradise on earth. You’ll have to look at the pics [...]

In something of a departure from what you’ll usually find here, I’m republishing a piece that I wrote quite a while ago. The article below appeared in the now defunct Political Review in mid-1993. A photocopy of the article has been sitting near my computer ever since I became self-employed in 2007. I’ve been meaning [...]

The idea I had of listing community gardens around the country wasn’t a novel one (see the nascent plotting community gardens wiki I started). At almost exactly the same time I started out, the folk at Good magazine created a Google map listing all the community gardens they could find. Spooky. I haven’t found the [...]

View Community gardens in Aotearoa New Zealand in a larger map See the map above, well I’d like your help to add to it. As part of some research I’m doing for an article on community gardening I want to know what is happening around Aotearoa New Zealand. By the looks of things there is [...]

The arrival of Lynda Hallinan’s weekly email newsletter couldn’t have been better timed. Every Friday in 2008 the New Zealand Gardener editor is sending out chatty gardening tips and commentary, along with news, competitions, recipes, and an ask an expert panel. Lynda has big plans for New Zealanders. This year her magazine has launched “a [...]

When I was outside unloading materials to expand our vege garden on what used to be our front lawn, Richard Scott from National Radio’s This way up show was talking about it. On Saturday’s show Richard ran an excerpt about a group of gardeners who are converting lawns to gardens. Edible Estates “is an ongoing [...]