Kōtare Vale doesn’t look like any farm I’ve ever seen.
I will admit that some of my wonder might be simple disorientation. I’ve flown from Fairbanks Alaska, where it has been nine below and snowing since September, to Christchurch New Zealand, where the weather is like a fine spring day at home: 50 degrees and overcast. This contrast, along with my stopover in perennially-tropical Hawaii, has completely scrambled my sense of the seasons. To confuse the matter further, New Zealand’s kind climate allows for bizarre bedfellows. Collected in the average suburban yard are temperate trees like oaks and maples, subarctic species like pine and birch, and a few sub-tropicals, not to mention every possible shrub and herb. My first sight outside the Christchurch International Airport is a palm-like native cabbage tree right next to a bushy blue spruce. It looks like horticultural heaven.
Vale, of course, means valley, so Kōtare is obviously not one of these flat Canterbury farms. The terrain soon rises into the steep, crumpled hills of the Banks Peninsula, a folded lump of volcanic land jutting out into the South Pacific. This area was once covered in thick native forest, but that was before New Zealand became the “island of the large white crowd,” as a friend from Christchurch once euphemized. (It’s a play on the meaning of the North Island’s original Maori name, Aotearoa, which translates as “island of the long white cloud.” Even the white folks are sardonic about the impact of colonization on this country.)
Walking the farm reminds me of wandering through a large and comfortable cottage. The forest canopy provides protection against the harsh winds and hot sun, and lessens the impact of raindrops on wet days. The narrow dirt trails lead like a series of hallways through room after outdoor room, each with its own particular lighting and humidity, influenced by the closeness of the vegetation and the varying turbulence of two small brown streams. I have seldom been so perfectly comfortable outside, even in adverse weather, so that at the end of a day of work I feel refreshed and reluctant to go inside, rather than ready to escape the sensory overload that can sometimes occur in exposed fields.
Wild species might seem like a “waste of space” in spite of these very real positives, especially to those who are consumed by fears of worldwide food shortage and obsessed with “efficiency” of agricultural output. By talking up the native ecosystem, I risk transgressing into the mushy and easily-dismissed realm of a feel-good, nature-for-its-own-sake, barefoot-hippie-style argument. This is a real working farm, though, not a half-cocked back-to-the-land experiment. And it is a real working farm in one important way that every monoculture of pasture or wheat is not:
This farm is a true ecosystem, in which the people who steward it are also an integral piece of the biological puzzle, not just managerial overlords who buy all their sustenance with the proceeds gained from selling the land’s products. It is a farm like our very first attempts at agriculture thousands of years ago, a modification and enhancement of a complex system rather than a complete uprooting and replanting. Rather than the “waste” we fear, the primary characteristic of this sort of management is abundance and synergy. Hen-and-chicken ferns, grown for their tender, sweet fiddleheads, simply would not survive as a monoculture, because they require the shade and protection of an intact canopy in order to thrive. Gourmet mushrooms like oyster and shitake need the forest both for this shelter, and also to supply the raw logs on which they grow. The trees themselves even prove useful.
My first task upon arrival (and one of my main occupations during my time on the farm) is to build trellising for a dozen varieties of rare beans Martin plants out for the local seed exchange network he administers. I have some experience with trellising, having constructed pea fences both in my mother’s garden as a child, and on a much larger scale two summers ago while working at Rosie Creek Farm in Fairbanks, Alaska. At first I give a little interior groan at the prospect, since trellising has usually meant hammering large, heavy metal stakes into the ground, and then wiring fencing or netting to the stakes, followed by careful training of the pea tendrils, which I can never do fast enough to satisfy the boss. It’s a loud, frustrating, repetitive job, but I am acutely aware that it sets a bad precedent to object to the very first task I’m given as a WWOOFer, so I smile and agree.
Rather than leading me to the expected pile of stakes and tangle of wire, Martin gives me an elegant little Japanese hand saw and directions over the bridge and up the bank, where I am to cut kanuka deadwood and haul it back to the bean bed, to make the main supports for a long wooden tipi-like structure. I also get similar directions to a number of large willow trees with suckers ideal for secondary poles, instructions on how to break thin pine deadwood for training sticks, and a coil of wire with which to make the whole thing hang together. Everything but the wire has grown within a short walk from the bean beds, entirely without human intention or intervention. A fanciful mind might well conclude that the ecosystem had foreseen our need for vine support, and contrived to give us exactly what we needed to make it. Of course this is nonsense, but the reality is even better, because intact ecosystems yield such a myriad of materials that with only a little human ingenuity and sweat, need-specific structures can be easily created. Problems of support are almost miraculously solved.
I also find that I enjoy the process of building with wood much more than with metal. The gentle snick of the saw is infinitely preferable to the ear-splitting clang of hammer on stake, and climbing a ladder to do the pounding is nowhere near as fun as scrambling around in willow branches over a bubbling stream. At the risk of overemphasizing aesthetics, I have to conclude that the result is also rather more attractive than a bare and boring pea fence. As Martin reminds me, anything that’s not exactly straight is “artistic,” making it unique without compromising the function of the structure. And rather than needing to be taken down again at the end of the season, this trellis will stand until the wood decays in four to six years. I’m quite proud of it, actually.