However, Nick Te Paa is staying positive about the move that will be required when the lease on the 151 Peverel St site expires in September.
Te Paa and his wife Loretta helped set up the community garden in 2013, later expanding the project to include a community pantry, or pātaka.
At not quite 4 sq m, the pātaka was too small for the weekly average of about 40 people it helped to feed, Te Paa said.
“We don’t have the capacity to store here, so a lot of the stuff is stored at my place in the garage.”
He hoped to rebuild it at twice the current size when a new location was settled on.
“All that extra will be just storage space, and that’ll free up my garage. One side’s completely taken up with food.”
The end of the Kāinga Ora lease was likely to mean the separation of the garden and the pantry.
They were hoping the pantry would relocate to Riccarton Plunket, and the garden to a Christchurch City Council site on Dilworth St, but nothing had been confirmed, he said.
A shared love of gardening and a drive to help the community motivated the Te Paas to keep running the 600 sq m site.
“We’re gardeners anyway, we’ve got a garden of our own and we’ve been brought up with gardens, so it didn’t take much to get everything going,” Te Paa said.
As well as garden produce, the pantry also sourced food from Foodbank Canterbury in Kilmarnock St, and from public donations.
Food was free, although a donation was appreciated as the garden had no income, he said.
A retiree, Te Paa spent between two and six hours per day at the site, open to the public on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
As well as vegetable beds, the site contains a glasshouse, two sheds, a worm farm, and a henhouse for the six hens that provided eggs for the pantry.
Introduced in 2015, only one of the original brood remained.
“Only one has lasted, good old Carmen. The idea behind the hens was not only to get the eggs but to try and give some calmness to the people . . . they see the hens and they say ‘aww’.’’
The volunteers made their own fertiliser using the liquid which drained from the worm farm.
As with everything used for the garden, this was organic.
Another example was the pantry itself, built at no cost by the man who also supplied the material.
“We had enough money to pay the guy, but he just did not want it.”
A highlight of his role was seeing this community input.
Another highlight was knowing he was making a difference to people who were down on their luck.
“They need food, and we say come along and we’ll give it to you. That’s rewarding, it really is.”
Spending time with the hens was another highlight of the role.
“They are precious to me, I love coming in and tending them, and they just calm me down completely.
Working in the garden left him with a feeling of peace and achievement, he said.
However, running the garden also came with its own challenges. They needed funding, and they needed volunteers.
Besides him and his wife, just two others regularly donated their time, a situation that impacted how often they could be open.
“We couldn’t get volunteers for the Saturday, so we had to close the Saturdays.”
The garden also presented hands-on challenges.
They had struggled to grow kumara, a vegetable better suited to more summery climates in any case, before learning a useful trick.
“We’ve found a method apparently. When we tried initially, they went straight down and they were spindly.”
However, placing a hard surface underneath the soil prevented the kumara from continuing to grow downwards.
“They grow out and grow big.”
The most surprising thing about his role was when new faces dropped by and told him they had not realised the garden was there.
“We’re not hiding,” he said.
