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Features

Sheryl Stivens: Organic Pioneer

Sheryl Stivens is a Soil & Health member who embodies the motto of ‘healthy soil, healthy food, healthy people’. Mercedes Walkham traces her life and finds out what makes her an organic pioneer and champion.
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Cultivating Change

Sarah Smuts-Kennedy shares her journey as an artist and advocate for regenerative farming practices, and her role in founding For the Love of Bees, OMG market garden, and the Earthworkers 101 course.
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From paddock to plate and back again

As he deepens his knowledge of organic and regenerative horticulture and the links with soil, food and health, Chris McIntosh of Ethos Café has found his life journey coming full circle.
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Gardening

Moon Calendar May-Jun 2025

It brings me great joy that Matariki is being celebrated in whole new ways in New Zealand – our natural new year in the southern hemisphere. In the Gregorian calendar, the ‘new year’ ticks over on an arbitrary day between ‘December’ and ‘January’.
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Join the No-Mow movement!

Dr John Flux’s neighbour once called to see if he had died – because the grass had grown so long! The Lower Hutt ecologist is an advocate of the no-mow movement because of its many environmental benefits, and describes here how he has implemented it for the past four years in his garden and on the footpath verge.
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Photos from Jenny’s garden

Soil & Health member Jenny Williamson shares some photos from her garden.
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Health and Food

Get-well-soon soup

This super flavourful and nourishing soup is the hearty winter pick-me-up of choice for Philippa Jamieson.
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Azadirachta indica - the neem tree

Neem: Nature’s healing gift to humanity

The neem tree has many benefits, including as a natural pesticide, fertiliser and it's a plant with various healing qualities. Katherine Smith reviews this book by Klaus Ferlow of Neem Research.
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Hot cross buns

This spicy, fruity and delicious hot cross bun recipe is by Isabel Pasch, who ran Bread and Butter Bakery in Auckland.
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Health and Food

Healthy weight loss

Diana Noonan discovered a surprising bonus while following a plant-based whole food eating plan. She also shares her super-easy and delicious recipes for bliss balls and whole-grain crackers.
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Sri Lankan pulled jackfruit curry

A deliciously unique vegan curry recipe. If you haven’t cooked with jackfruit before, this is an easy way to start. Recipe from Healthy Kelsi by Kelsi Boocock
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Easy peri chicken dish

Easy peri peri chicken

A simple spicy chicken recipe from The Good Farm Cookbook, which features wholefood, ethical protein, gluten-free, low-sugar recipes.
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Farming and Horticulture

Mushrooming with next-gen homesteaders

Lenny Prinz and Jodi Collins lead a busy and inspiring life that includes growing mushrooms and cultivating spawn, developing compostable mushroom packaging, creating art, raising children, gardening and community projects. Read their story here.
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Working with the earth

Coral Ramiro is the manager of Earth Stewards certified organic urban farm in Kirikiriroa / Hamilton, and an alumna of the Earthworkers Hort 101 programme. She tells her story to Sarah Smuts-Kennedy.
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Gorse in flower

Stop, look and listen to the weeds

Organic gardeners and growers can be challenged by weeds. But if we learn to work with them – to observe what weeds grow where, we'll see what they're telling us about the soils.
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Building and Technology

Living Better, Together

In an increasingly disconnected world, many people are seeking ways to live more closely with both the environment and one another. For Simone Woodland, a dream to create a different way of life led to the Tākaka Cohousing project in Golden Bay. 
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Shelf life – or human life?

There is a new system of industrial food manufacturing that produces edible substances that are not food, but rather food products containing novel, synthetic molecules never found in nature. These ever-increasing laboratory-engineered chemistry experiments are designed to simulate food. 
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Critical Thinking on Gene Technology Regulation

Layers of manipulation and obfuscation are being used to package deregulation of gene technologies as a net positive. Bonnie Flaws outlines how, and why one of New Zealand’s leading biological science professors considers regulation the best tool we have to prevent risk.
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