Tui Chicken Grit

You’d normally associate an orchard with a large area, but there’s plenty of options to plant for a smaller version in your backyard! Whether you’re a citrus lover or into feijoas, Ministry of Ground’s Dan Mackay shares his top picks and tips.

My father Fred was famous for his tomatoes. His vines produced prolifically, and the fruit was always amazingly sweet and flavoursome. For Fred, growing good tomatoes was all about seaweed. Once or twice a year, we kids would be enlisted to help him gather the fine seagrass weed that grew in the tidal estuaries around Pauatahanui. Vast rafts of this stinky stuff would wash up after a big storm and we would walk for miles to fill big sacks of the stuff, then lug them back down the long beach before the tide got too high. The sacks were so heavy it always took two of us to hiff them into the boot.

At Tui, we've been digging in since ages ago. Here's a few ways we can all be digging in.