Since its establishment last summer, the 275 square metre garden’s produced a tonne of potatoes, 100kg of carrots, 80kg of onions, 84 pumpkins and boxes of fruit, including plums, pears, apples and peaches.
All the produce it’s produced has been given directly to Queenstown food rescue charity KiwiHarvest, which shares it between 14 local charities — feeding 900 people each week.
KiwiHarvest Queenstown branch manager Gary Hough says the impact from the garden can’t be underestimated.
"The way they have transformed their private land into something that gives back and helps so many people is an amazing model."
The gardeners behind this effort have asked to remain anonymous, but they want to encourage others who have spare land to consider doing something similar.
Hough says a couple more gardens of this size in the Whakatipu would help satisfy the increasing demand for fresh food.
"It would be amazing to have more local growers like this to offset and give some sort of security in terms of nutritional food to the charities we work with on a consistent basis," he says.
"It also goes back to Queenstown only being 5% self-sufficient, which puts a huge detriment on the area — if anything big happens we would only have a few days’ worth of food to go around."
KiwiHarvest has a relationship with local orchards and is lucky enough to receive a lot of seasonal fruit, but Hough notes vegetable growers are harder to come by in the Basin.
Because of that, Hough and his team often have to rely on veggies from other KiwiHarvest branches, like Invercargill.
"With the reality of land prices in the area it makes a commercial vegetable farm hard to come by — the setup that these gardeners have created is amazing, because there’s a lot of landowners with large amounts of land that could be used for growing food."
Hough challenges anyone with good land available to follow the model of growing to give back, and see the impact it can have.
