Tools for Permaculture Living

This couple’s resilient lifestyle and business have been inspired by their global travels and desire for true sustainability. Tess and Marco Partridge run Crafty Gatherer, making gardening tools and domestic implements in the Papamoa Hills, Bay of Plenty.

Marco is a skilled builder with a penchant for craft. He has an inventive eye for implements that make living a sustainable lifestyle easier. His flagship design is the Forksta, a cross between a garden fork and a broadfork. “It’s ideal for aerating soil without disturbing precious biology,” he says.

All the materials Marco uses are recycled, upcycled, or otherwise sustainably sourced. For example, seed trays and seed-saving screens are made from macrocarpa or Lawson’s cypress from a local sawmill. Bread knives and pot stirrers are from recycled rimu. Dowels for laundry racks are purchased locally from Vincent House Trust in Te Puke, which assists men with addiction and mental health issues to find work in the community.

Learning, travelling and appropriate technology

Tess and Marco are long-time locals with a focus on community. They met in their teens at Te Puke High School. Marco went on to train as a builder, and Tess to gain a degree in communications, majoring in PR and communication management. Once qualified, the couple set off to wwoof around Europe.

“Wwoofing was a great way to travel,” said Tess. “Both of us were interested in gardening and sustainable lifestyles. It got us in amongst the culture so it was a good way to learn.”

When they later travelled through Africa, the Middle East, India, Nepal and Thailand, Marco, who had always crafted things from the resources around him, was inspired by how simply people could live from what was close to hand, and how happy they could be.

Back in New Zealand, they spent six months at Koanga Institute at Kotare near Wairoa. Marco did an appropriate technology internship there, including making and learning about renewable solar driers, biochar, rammed earth, and non-electrical ram water pumps.

Self-sufficiency at home

Now with three boys, Tahl (7), Jai (5), and Odi (2), the family lives their dream on twelve acres, four of which are in regenerating bush and the rest in rolling pasture. They’ve chosen not to travel to jobs elsewhere, and have instead created a living from their home base. During their travels, they saw broadforks all over Europe, and at Koanga, but no one was manufacturing them in New Zealand, so they started making them. With that, Crafty Gatherer was born.

“We create the products we need and would be helpful for others wishing for a simple more sustainable lifestyle,” says Tess.

The family runs nine ‘beefies’, two sheep, and eighteen chooks. Using organic and permaculture principles, they have an extensive garden with all sorts of everything that keeps them supplied with fruit and vegetables, and offers a seed-gathering sideline. Tess grows seedlings for the local community gardens. Marco spreads his latest passion, fermented plant juice, on the paddocks with a sprayer he made. Fermented plant juices (FPJ) are used in Korean Natural Farming – a method that began in the 1960s. FPJs can be made from many plants such as comfrey, banana plant, nettle, California thistle, etc. Equal parts of brown sugar and plant matter are mixed together and with an occasional stirring, left to ferment and liquefy, for a couple of weeks, depending on temperatures. This and other KNF practices utilise microbes to improve soil heath and plant vigour.

Permablitz projects

The couple are members of an active local permaculture group, PermaBlitz Bay of Plenty (www.permablitzbopnz.net). Members must help out at a blitz three times before they can benefit from one at their own place. Tess has a Permaculture Design Certificate from the Waikato Permaculture Collective, which allows her to be part of the design guild of PermablitzBOP.

She’s also done an Advanced Permaculture Design course with Dan Palmer (2015), which means she can help to design blitzes. This might include anything from designing gardens, compost systems, food forests, grey water areas and more, then calling together the volunteers to bring the project to fruition. Group members range in age from their late teens to early seventies. Reciprocity works for everyone; they all learn from each other.

Shipping container house

The Partridge family lives in two offset 40-foot shipping containers with pitched roofs built over them. In between is space for the lounge and a mezzanine floor for the kids’ playroom and storage, with more storage in the roofs. The entire floor area including the mezzanine is 76m². The house is constructed mainly from recycled materials and, without counting Marco’s hours, cost $30,000.

The family cook on a gas hob and oven, and periodically in their pizza oven on the adjoining patio. They’ve also cooked over the top of their biochar burners.

Composting loos and grey water

Three composting toilets serve the property. Inside the house – and at the cob cottage – are bucket systems. After each use, a bit of sawdust is sprinkled over the top. When it’s full the bucket is replaced with an empty one, and taken outside to be lidded and stored until they run out of buckets. Then the contents are transferred into a drum and layered with various compostables such as straw, comfrey, grass clippings, food scraps, and biochar. The humanure mix is then left to sit for a year, at the end of which it will be a rich soil full of microbes, worms, and nutrients, ready for spreading around the orchard and trees.

Another composting toilet system in use is a wheelie bin under an outdoor toilet. The bin has a vent at the top to help with aerobic breakdown and a tap at the bottom to drain liquids if needed. This one is much appreciated when the Partridges run workshops with lots of extra people. Once full, the bin is labelled and wheeled out to where it can compost down in the bin, ready for spreading around the orchard and trees as with the humanure mix.

Initially Marco trialled a greywater system with homemade worm farms, but has switched to dispersing grey water through various baffles out to water-loving plants on a slope: hydrangeas, flax, tī kouka, mānuka, akeake and herbs.

Earthbuilding and other workshops

Crafty Gatherer offers several workshops, including ones on seed-saving, and starting your own garden.

A few years ago Plenty Permaculture (plentypermaculture.co.nz) invited the Partridges to host a cob-building workshop using materials from the land. Over nine days 26 people camped there and built a cob cottage under the guidance of Rosa Henderson of Sculpted Earth (see ‘An earthbuilding journey’ in Organic NZ Sep/Oct 2018).

The project took three years to complete as resources became available after the initial cottage was constructed. That included interior-exterior earth plastering, crafting furniture, landscaping, and creating the outdoor kitchen and bathrooms. Today it is a popular glamping experience.

Creating a better world

It’s the kind of life many dream of, but if you’re truly urbanised the shift might take some consideration. Although they can watch movies on a computer, there’s no TV. The Partridge family lives a life of low waste and low energy consumption, while providing for themselves from what is to hand, including roadside finds of seedlings such as macrocarpa, old furniture, timber and anything else they can recycle.

They grow a lot of their own food, drying some of it, and fermenting or preserving other foods, but there are still trips to the shops. They are trying to let go of a perfectionist ideal of the lifestyle.

“We’re a normal family,” Tess says, “doing our best to create a better world for our children.”

Tahl attends a Waldorf School twelve minutes away. Tess likes that he’s getting a social education delivered via a holistic lens. The school focuses on each child’s needs through stories, games, imagination and outdoor activities and offers extra support and programmes.

The boys are learning at home too: they love to hang out with Marco, watching and helping as he crafts useful items for themselves and for sale. The family also makes their own cleaning products. Tess writes a blog, and here and there is able to use the skills she learned in her communications studies.

Perhaps key to this family’s lifestyle is their insistence on knowing and being an active part of their community. Importantly, they share their knowledge with others. And, as Tess says, “knowing the skills collectively held, so everyone can share together instead of living individual lives”.

Crafty Gatherer at a glance

Location: Te Puke Quarry Road, Papamoa Hills
Activities: Making gardening, domestic, and other implements; running workshops; growing seed, seedlings and food; raising animals; permaculture design consultation
Products include: Forkstas, broadforks, fly swats, bread knives, BBQ and grill cleaning implements, compost sieves, flat-pack composting toilets, insect hotels, biochar burners, laundry racks, and a solar dehydrator is under development.
Website: http://craftygatherer.co.nz
Cob Cottage Glamping: co.nz/cob-cottage

First published in Organic NZ magazine March/April 2021 Vol.80 No.2