Student working towards sustainability

University of Otago masters student Bart Acres hopes an urban organic gardening network and website he developed will encourage more people to give growing their own vegetables a go. Photo by Jane Dawber.

Bart Acres (23) began growing his own organic vegetables two years ago and wanted to pass on the knowledge he had gained and make it easier for others to get started.

He established an urban organic gardening network and developed an interactive website, which hosts numerous discussion forums, to make it easy for potential gardeners to find all the information they need in one place and ask questions of other gardeners.

Mr Acres, who grows vegetables in the backyard of his student flat, and has just finished up a business growing specialty mushrooms to return to full-time study, said he had spent much time talking to growers at the Otago Farmers Market and reading every book he could to find out what would grow well in Dunedin and when to plant it.

"It was the type of information I had to actively seek out and took me quite a while to find. That is why I started the urban organic network.

I've tried to make that information accessible to people because that seemed to be one of the major things holding people back from starting vegetable gardens."

He taught himself how to build the website and spent his evenings after work working on it before launching www.urbanorganics.org.nz a couple of months ago.

So far, about 80 people had registered on the site.

Only a tiny proportion of the food consumed in Dunedin was produced here, but if more people started growing food in their backyard, it would be another step closer to becoming a more sustainable, Mr Acres said.

"I don't like the feeling of relying on the supermarket completely for my food. We can't predict what is going to happen in the future and we don't want to be completely relying on imported food to survive."

He was first attracted to organic gardening as he did not want to use chemicals, which were not only expensive but contained numerous warnings about their use.

The more he looked into and read about organic gardening, the more he became convinced it was a better system, he said.