Healthy Families Rotorua’s Nau Mai e Ngā Hua sustainable gardening workshops are connecting people with the whenua through practical, hands-on learning.

In a world of increasingly pressing environmental challenges, these workshops offer timely solutions by blending mātauranga Māori with sustainable gardening techniques.

Held at Maraeroa Mahinga Kai in Ōhinemutu, the series provides valuable skills in areas like planting kūmara, organic composting, and seed saving. Participants have already learned the art of planting kūmara, worm farming, and creating compost that enriches the soil. The next workshop will focus on seed saving, a crucial practice for maintaining strong, self-sustaining gardens.

Kai champion and composting workshop facilitator Cushla Paice is active in Healthy Families Rotorua’s ecosystem.

“If you can think of your māra as an ecosystem, including all the bacteria and fungi in the soil, plants, insects, birds, maybe a mouse or two, and us if we’re lucky. Every time we harvest kai, we take nutrients out of the ecosystem, so we need to keep giving back. Nature’s way of recycling nutrients is for microorganisms and other critters in the soil to compost everything on the forest floor and slowly turn it back into plant food and soil. Our ways of composting speed up that process so we can keep giving back to our soil life to feed the next generations in the māra.

“Composting at home will give you compost that is full of life – microbes, critters, and worms. A living ecosystem. What you buy from the shop has been wrapped in plastic and sitting on shelves. It doesn’t have as much life in it. You might notice that your home living compost smells like the forest floor. That’s the magic happening,” she says.

As environmental challenges grow, Healthy Families Rotorua Practice & Development Lead Pirihira Whata says the Nau Mai e Ngā Hua workshops offer a way to inspire real change, starting right in our gardens.

“Our relationship with the whenua is at the heart of who we are. By using traditional Māori knowledge in our gardening, we’re protecting the environment and keeping our mātauranga alive for future generations.

“These workshops show that the land isn’t just a resource – it’s something to be cared for and respected. By blending traditional knowledge with modern practices, they help people adopt sustainable methods that benefit the environment and our cultural traditions,” says Pirihira.