Grant Douglas: gardening guru and community worker

June 20th, 2010
By David Armstrong

Grant Douglas strongly believes that a good life consists of three periods: you learn stuff, then you do stuff, then you teach others how to do stuff. Although he's still doing plenty of learning and doing, Grant's life is now moving into the third phase as increasingly he finds himself helping and advising newbie gardeners on the secrets of growing plants.

Grant has become a regular contributor to this website, with his weekly diary of what to plant in the Motueka area and when. If you haven't seen his columns, check it out here in the "Our environment" section. He also sends this information as an email newsletter to about 50 subscribers.

His roots (sorry about the pun, but it had to come) were in two great loves: a socialist ethic and making things grow.

He started out training to be a primary school teacher, hoping to make changes in education and guide his pupils into open and unregimented ways of thinking. He dropped the idea when he discovered the weight of conformity and conventional organisation in classrooms back in the late 1960s.

Instead, he chose to make his living doing practical things he was good at - cooking, gardening and property caretaking. With his wife Gaile (they married when he was 18), he moved from Upper Hutt to a property in the Marlborough Sounds, and then some time later to Hunterville in the central North Island, where he worked as a cowman/gardener on a big station. "The climate at Hunterville was terrible and made us want to live in a better climate, and working as a cowman gardener confirmed my socialist views," he says.

Aged 25 and with three sons (their fourth was born shortly after), Grant and Gaile decided to move into Riverside Community in Lower Moutere.

"I'd visited Riverside when I was at Teacher Training College, and felt quite inspired by what it stood for. We very strongly believed in socialist principles and pacifism. Also, when we lived in the Sounds it was quite a little community there, so we had come to like community living. Riverside was well established and successful. There was a wide range of ages, from children to grandparents and good role models. It was a great place."

At the time, Riverside was much larger than now with more than 60 residents, and was financially strong. It boasted a 120-cow dairy herd, 50 acres of apples, 10 acres of boysenberries, sheep and beef ... but no proper vegetable garden.

Enter Grant Douglas. "Initially it was part time and just for the community, but by the time we left 18 years later it was about 2 hectares (10 acres). It was Biogro-certified and we sold to the local people through a little shop."

The next move, early in the 1990s, took them into Motueka and the first of three properties in Trewavas Street. Grant got a gardening job at the Kimi-ora health resort in Kaiteriteri, building new gardens and establishing a veggie plot.

Gradually his expertise extended more widely throughout the Motueka community, with part-time work in a local nursery, home gardening for regular clients, his own home-based plant sales from the two tunnel houses out back, and later running courses. This year he has taken on a small piece of land at Riverside to grow, organically, some vegetables for sale.

Which is where he began to increasingly move into his phase three - passing on his knowledge and experience to others. In 2008 he ran a gardening mentoring course funded by the District Health Board's 'Healthy Living' budget, which received some media coverage throughout New Zealand.

Last year Grant helped establish a large vege garden at Riverside, the produce from which came onto the market early this year from the Community's cafe shop. Also last year, Tasman District Council funded six gardening classes which Grant ran from the Motueka Community House, which were oversubscribed. They will be run again this August.

"These classes attracted a huge variety of people, from lifestylers to people struggling to make ends meet. There were about 48 people signed up."

Next up, Grant is currently involved in "tentative talks with some funding available" for the starting of a community garden on Council land off Old Wharf Road. Watch this space!

Grant cannot pinpoint how or why he developed his enthusiasm for gardening and growing, but he does remember the times during his schooldays when Yates (the seed merchants) had a schools programme on basic gardening aimed at getting kids involved.

"Since about the age of 10, I've enjoyed being in gardens and outdoors. I love plants of all types, not just vegetables, but vegetables especially because we need them to live. I believe in organics, but in a down-to-earth practical, productive way."

Grant and Gaile have no intentions of ever leaving Motueka and its great climate. Gaile has strong friendships and works with Womens Support Link and the Community House. The two have been on a year-long caravan trip all over New Zealand but haven't seen any place they'd rather be.

"And it's nice to live somewhere where you're known and where you've got a role in the community," he adds.

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