In the seaside suburb of New Brighton hides a vibrant secret garden, teeming with green life.
New Brighton Community Gardens are open to the public, with many volunteering their time for a chance to till the soil. There are many benefits to gardening and spending time in green spaces. Urban green spaces improve visitor wellbeing and decrease stress and anxiety. They promote engagement with nature, local biodiversity and mitigate pollution in urban centres.
Established in 2005, the New Brighton Community Gardens has grown from strength to strength, providing locally grown food for the community. A key part of the garden’s engagement is to provide a place for learning. Throughout the year, the gardens host a range of educational programmes for schools and various community groups. One of these programmes is the Propagating Young Gardeners which is part of a wider community initiative. Over 10 weeks, children from local schools spend their Friday afternoon pottering around the gardens and learning about growing seedlings, sustainability, composting and cooking with the fresh garden produce.
This year, Canterbury Museum is offering a specialised insect programme aptly called Bugs in the Garden. In this programme, kids get hands-on with our collection of insect and spider display cases, take part in a guided bioblitz of the gardens and examine mini beasts under a microscope to get a better understanding of these amazing creatures and the mahi (work) they do for us and our planet. A bioblitz is a survey of an area to find and identify all the plants and animals that live there. A bioblitz can focus on a specific group of animals like insects, spiders and other invertebrates, as we do in this programme.
The students learn how scientists sample insect biodiversity and try out one of the methods themselves. The education team and the students set up pitfall traps in the garden, coming up with ideas about the best place to set them up (i.e. would you set up by the compost or in the middle of a garden bed?) and what type of invertebrates (animals without a backbone) they might catch. The next week we pull up the traps and examine under the microscope what we’ve caught. We talk about what we've learned and the critters we've captured. A community garden is the perfect place to learn about insects and other critters, that work quietly to make the world go round!
The New Brighton Community Gardens are open to the public Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 10.00 am to 4.00 pm and Saturday from 10.00 am to 2.00 pm. Located at 136 Shaw Avenue, Rawhiti Domain, New Brighton.
