As the Trust announced in April at the annual conference in Auckland, we are now ready to launch the Earth Star initiative. You might recall that this came about as a way for members to engage in environmentally sustainable practices in your gardens. The award of an ‘Earth Star’ will be made if you meet the target points as set by the Trust.

But why do we conference?  It’s no small thing to step away from normal life for four days, leaving homes, work, family (and gardens ). It doesn’t matter where we are in our gardening journey, how old or young we are, or what we believe outside the garden – for those four days, we get to be absolutely unashamedly garden-loving-geeks. We are connected by a simple love of growing. 

We often say that it all started with just one flower, and that flower was planted, of all places, in the vegetable garden. At the time, we felt a bit cheeky about it. Steph even asked permission (a rare moment!) to sneak that single bloom into the raised veg beds. And so it began.