Harvest brings an opportunity for gratitude and appreciation for what the garden provides to nourish us! And it can be quite magical to see the bounty from all the mahi and time that has gone before – the full seed to plate journey.
At Kelmarna we celebrate harvest everyday via our shared lunches. Each and every day, we cook a healthy, veggie based meal to be shared with our staff and volunteers. Not only is it a lovely way to thank volunteers for their contribution, it’s also an important opportunity for connection. Volunteers get to know each other over a plate of good food that they’ve helped to grow, freshly harvested from the garden around us. It’s a place to share everyday conversations, joy and community spirit, and we hope that it’s a place everyone can feel welcome and included.
Our lunches primarily consist of produce grown in the gardens here. In summer potatoes are a regular feature, then in autumn and winter our stored stocks of pumpkin come into play. These are grown specially to provide for our lunches in more marginal parts of the garden that are not prime for market gardening. We harvest edible weeds (there’s always an abundance of those around) as cooking greens, things like galinsoga, alexanders,and nasturtium, which we typically throw into a quick stir-fry-type dish. And we always have a fresh salad – populated with a multitude of different leaves for an abundance of flavour and nutrition. These leaves are seconds, still perfectly good to eat, but either slightly too big or with too many insect bites out of them to sell in our farm shop. It’s another way we reduce waste, and ensure we make the most of what harvest has to offer.
Bread is a welcome addition too. The bread course comes via surplus bread donations from local bakeries, which is collected by volunteers of the AMURT charity. They gather and distributes loaves to many different community groups around Auckland, providing a wonderful community service!
Lunchtime like this encourages us to take an important and necessary pause in the middle of our busy work day. We eat, we chat, we sit, we digest. It’s a more mindful, intentional way to experience a meal. And we believe this whole approach of sharing harvest and a cooked lunch together is vital to creating meaningful relationships, both with each other and this land we farm.
This blog post was originally created for the Eat NZ Kaitaki Substack.