Meet the growers: Crooked Vege’s green revolution

By Hannah Zwartz
Photography by Helen Wall
& Karli Mitchell

Featured in Capital #90
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How do you farm without owning land? On the fringes of Ōtaki, in a scene straight from Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood, two young farmers are growing vegetables as an act of revolution.

Crooked Vege’s Tae Luke-Hurley and Jonathan Mines found their patch of land with the help of a group called Village Agrarians, who (among other things) match landowners with landless farmers. “They’re addressing the issue of people who have more land than they need, but want to do something productive with it, and the issue of people who can’t afford to get onto the land but have the energy to do something with it,” says Jon. “We knew there were lots of life stylers out there with more land than they can manage, but how do you connect to those people?”

In the end it was surprisingly easy, and the response was huge. “We thought that we would have to work really hard to make it happen, but I think after our post went up I went and made dinner, and missed about 27 phone calls.”

Choosing the right piece of land was important. “We did a big trip around the country in our van and chose Ōtaki because we met local growers with a collaborative mindset, saying how can we help.” Locals are very open to sharing tools and resources, says Jon; and the huge range of skills needed to run a small farm – from construction to drainage to accounting, sales and distribution logistics – means that cooperation makes a whole lot of sense. The relationship with the landowners (who live on site, across an old pear orchard being converted to a food forest), is also critical. There is a lease agreement, but it’s also a relationship of trust. “It’s kind of a crazy thing to do with people you don’t know – move into their back paddock.”

When I visit, the pair have been living on the land for just six weeks, in a caravan without power or running water. But with help from a team of mates, they’ve already established several hundred square metres of beds in cover crops – buckwheat and Burseem clover, and a mixture of linseed, daikon, broad beans, barley, oats, hairy vetch, blue lupin and rye. The ground is heavy clay with a mat of dense buttercup. It’s fertile, but the structure has been damaged by cattle, creating waterlogging issues.

Crooked Vege are using no-dig techniques to develop beds; first, pasture is mown low, then ‘tarped’ – covered with black plastic for several months to knock back weeds. Cardboard is then laid down and covered in a layer of compost into which cover crops are sown. Applications of calcium will slowly loosen the soil structure and reduce acidity, helping the microbial life that’s crucial to the soil and plant health.

Cover crops, also called green manures, are a way of building up the soil without having to buy expensive compost (Crooked Vege are a low budget operation – Jon jokes about having to ration duct tape.) A tunnel house already on site is being used to grow mixed greens for the restaurant trade, and winter will be spent building up the soil and developing infrastructure. A water supply, a portacabin, and a wash station will mean they can hit the ground running with vege planting when the ground warms up in spring.

Jon and Tae are experimenting with polycropping, interplanting main crops of celery, kale, and silverbeet with faster-growing side crops of radish, pak choi, parsley, spring onion, and rocket. They have years of experience in this sort of small-scale market gardening, most recently in Taranaki, but, as each piece of land is different, they’re customising software to input exact planting dates and growing times for this particular terroir.