Sunflowers draw in Hawke’s Bay to Crude Food community garden

Garth and Inge McCarthy with daughter Paige at Crude Foods sunflower field and community garden. Photo / Connull Lang

Sunflowers have sprung up from the silt in Puketapu outside of Napier, proving to be an eye-catching drawcard for a project supporting food resilience in Hawke’s Bay.

New charitable organisation Crude Food invited the public to brighten up their days by immersing themselves in a field of sunflowers over the weekend, with more than a few taking bunches home.

Inge and Gareth McCarthy created the new community garden this year on the Cyclone Gabrielle devastated land where Inge’s parents’ house used to be.

“The sunflowers were purely planted for the smiles for Hawke’s Bay. Hawke’s Bay has been through a pretty rough time in the last year,” Inge McCarthy said.

“They look fantastic and have created so much buzz, which is great. We are hoping that creates some awareness about the community garden project we are doing.”

The McCarthy family household started to become self-sufficient with food and power about seven years ago and they saw the benefits of their resilient lifestyle through Covid lockdowns and Cyclone Gabrielle.

Now they want to share the fruits of that knowledge with the community.

Inge said there was a lack of resources and spaces in Hawke’s Bay for teaching gardening and a lack of general community garden spaces, and they want to improve community food resilience.

She said her parents were “absolutely on board” with having the community garden on their land when they put the idea to them.

“We aim to teach gardening practices to the community, we’ve had school groups come out and anyone who wants to learn how to garden or be part of the community group and garden together.

Guests of Crude Food walk away with a bounty of sunflowers. Photo / Connull Lang

Gareth, who left his job as a joiner to work full-time running Crude Food, said he also saw the garden as a way to bring people together and talking with each other after everything that had happened.

“I sort of lost the plot after the cyclone and when we were in the process of it I needed it to be a place for people to be able to talk because it has been devastating for lots of people,” Gareth said.

He said they have had visitors from Waipukurau and as far away as Auckland.

“On the Saturday we had about 120 people which was good because we had only really marketed it on the Friday. Then on Sunday, we had about 120 people in the first 15 minutes,” he said.

The Stok family from Napier at Crude Food taking in the sunflowers. Left to right are Keanu, 11, Korbyn, 8, Lilly-Shani, 4, Mother Lisa, Isla Jane, 2, and father Shelton. Photo / Connull Lang

They hope to have the organic food forest open in years to come for the public to come and harvest food for themselves.

The vegetables will be free of charge, all they ask in return is for people to consider stopping by to help with planting or weeding from time to time.

“We’ve planted our vegetable garden, we’ve planted a thousand native trees in there, we’ve got about 70 fruit trees in a food forest that we’ve created, we’ve put in a whole lot of regenerative seed to see what will come back nicely and to help the soil.”

They aim to open their sunflower field again at 492 Puketapu Road on Wednesday and Saturday this week, from 10am until 1pm, weather dependent.

James Pocock joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2021 and writes breaking news and features, with a focus on environment, local government and post-cyclone issues in the region. He has a keen interest in finding the bigger picture in research and making it more accessible to audiences. He lives in Napier. james.pocock@nzme.co.nz