Paddock Garden
08 November 2025
At Waionehu, the Paddock Garden began the way good ideas often do — with an experiment, a bit of curiosity, and a tractor that needed a new purpose.
This wasn’t a bare paddock sprayed out or stripped down. We decided early on to terminate the pasture biologically, using timing, animals, and soil life instead of chemistry. The cows went in first, grazing the pasture hard and low to open up the canopy and kickstart cycling. From there, we followed up with a spring cultivation, just enough to open the surface and let oxygen in.
Two weeks later, we ran the spring tine cultivator again to break up the root mat and start levelling the ground. After that pass, the soil was ready for what it had been waiting for — a generous dose of farm compost blended with activated biochar. This mix reintroduces organic matter, stabilises nutrients, and lays down carbon for the microbial community to build from. A final tine pass five days later settled everything into a warm, even seedbed.
It’s a quiet satisfaction, watching the big gear working differently — not to grow feed, but to grow food.
🥔 Deep-Planted Potatoes, Living Cover
The potatoes will go in next, set deep at around 45 cm using our small tractor and single drill. We won’t be hilling them — instead, we’re trying something a bit different.
Between the rows, a living cover crop of phacelia, plantain, white clover, and chicory will fill the space. These species will help outcompete annual weeds like fathen, hold soil moisture, and keep the surface shaded and cool through the summer.
By the time the potato plants start flowering, that living mulch will be doing double duty — drawing in pollinators and fixing carbon through the roots. It’s all about creating enough competition for the weeds, but not for the crop.
🌱 The Vegetable Strip
Along the fenceline, there’s a 90-metre strip set aside for the vegetable rows — our structured food system within the paddock.
Here, we’ll feed out rank lucerne baleage as mulch — a thick, nutrient-rich blanket that suppresses weeds, feeds worms, and locks in moisture. The vegetable seedlings will be planted straight into that layer.
The layout is simple but purposeful:
🍅 Tomatoes and basil, with marigolds woven between for colour and pest control.
🥦 Broccoli, lettuce, and spring onions, spaced for airflow and ease of harvest.
🥒 Courgettes and nasturtiums, tumbling out over the lucerne mulch.
🌶 Capsicums, parsley, and dill, bringing structure and diversity to the midsection.
🥗 Fast greens and radishes, filling every available space to keep the soil covered.
The lucerne mulch also gives us options. If February turns dry, we can tee into the nearby water line for a simple irrigation system, or even give the plants a light foliar feed with fish fertiliser from the tow-n-fert as it drives past.
This garden is built to be practical — managed with what’s already on hand, but designed with regenerative intent.
🌽 Between the Rows – The Three Sisters
Between the potatoes and the vegetable strip sits our Three Sisters-style planting — corn, pumpkins, and beans. The corn gives structure, the pumpkins spread across the soil as a living mulch, and the beans climb upward to fix nitrogen and tie it all together.
It’s the same principle we’re testing across the farm: let plants do the work that inputs used to do.
🌿 Why It Matters
The Paddock Garden is our structured system — the proof-of-concept for how we can integrate food growing into productive farmland without compromising stock, soil, or time. It’s also a way to reconnect the land to the kitchen, closing loops and feeding people from the same soil that supports our animals.
Everything about this patch is an experiment — the timing, the planting depth, the cover species — but it’s also a statement.
That farming can be productive, beautiful, and nourishing all at once.
No sprays. No bare soil. No single-purpose paddocks. Just living systems layered together, doing what nature already knows how to do — with a bit of help from the big gear.
