Kōanga Wānanga
Over a weekend in November, under the glorious rays of Tamanuiterā, whānau came together to dream of what we might grow for the future of Wairewa.
The future of marae wastewater
The primary focus of the wānaka was whenua. We had a team from NIWA joining us to share their mahi in wastewater research and how we might work together to develop a culturally appropriate, cost-effective and high performance cultural-eco treatment system to replace the current septic tank and holding tank system. NIWA took the time to understand our future needs and aspirations for managing marae wastewater and we spent some time exploring relevant mātauranga around how waste was managed in the past.
Planting at Te Kaio
Robin Wybrow introduced whānau to Clayton Wallwork, Head of Forest and Biodiversity at Orion. Clayton came to kōrero with whānau about the potential for recloaking the Te Kaio Bay Farm with native trees and shurbs. We discussed some of the things that are important to us as whānau and kaitiaki of the whenua and we imagined what it might be like to have bird life thriving on the whenua and even the possibility of seeing Pōhutukawa flowering once again. It was great to have the time to dream about what might be possible now and in the future.
Exploring opportunities for māra kai at Wairewa
We welcomed Kusal Perera on to the marae on Friday morning. Kusal is supporting Kelly and the wider Pou Wairewatanga team to investigate and map out whānau aspirations for maara kai at Wairewa. Kusal spent time getting to know whānau, he stayed on the marae with us and facilitated discussion to help us envision more dynamic uses of our whenua in harmony with our kaitiakitaka.
This is part of a kaupapa called MABx, funded by Ministry of Primary Industries to support whānau Māori to ‘diversify’ land use and kai production. Whānau were engaged in discussions around how we might develop our capacity to grow, harvest and produce kai on our whenua – we explored our why and what we can do now to provide for the future, for our tamariki, and for our mokopuna.
We are looking forward to developing a plan for our own extensive māra kai to feed whānau and our local community.
For us, one thing we’ve come to learn is that big plans start small, so we’ve made a small start on our māra by adding a second vegepod. Pakeke and tamariki spent time building our second pod and filling it up with strawberry plants for summer! We were thrilled to be harvesting celery, spring onion, lettuce and herbs from our first vegepod, set up in May this year and are looking forward to harvesting our strawberries, onions and taewa in the new year. The vegepods are a small start towards a bigger vision for growing kai Wairewa and it was awesome to see our tamariki so engaged in the planting, mostly I think they are looking forward to eating the strawberries when they are next out at the marae!
