The rural kitchen in Aotearoa, 1800–1940 | Growing fruit, vegetables and grains

In Polynesia, where kūmara grows year round, it is propagated by planting shoots, but in Aotearoa kūmara grows only in summer and must be grown from tubers. It was therefore essential to devise an effective storage facility which would keep the kūmara fresh through the winter and allow for re-planting in spring, a facility which took the form of a roofed, drained and sealed pit (rua). These were best classified as semi-subterranean storehouses, made by excavating a large section of ground and then covering the space with a sloped roof. Often this was covered with earth, while inside small drains were built to carry off stormwater. Once built, fronds would be placed on the floor of the pit, and the kūmara or potatoes stacked with great care. As Tom Smiler Junior remembered of his childhood at Waituhi in the 1920s:

“One of the main occupations was tending the kūmara plantation. . . . In those days people were always so careful handling kūmara and other garden crops. I remember helping the old man [his grandfather] put the kūmara one by one into the flax basket, so carefully, that they wouldn’t get bruised. If they got bruised they could go rotten in the kūmara pit- all the time he’d be saying in Māori, ‘Careful, careful, e Hā!’. . .

. . . Always so much care. The reason? Because Māori lived from season to season and those kūmara had to last a year, between one harvest time and the next, so that there was sufficient food to keep everyone alive.”

The same structure could be used to store potatoes, and the concept was adopted by some Pākehā for this purpose.

European explorers brought a range of new plants to Aotearoa. In 1769, for example, Jean-François de Survillegave wheat, peas and rice to Ngāti Kahu at Tokerau Doubtless Bay, though it is unlikely that the seeds grew successfully as Māori were root-crop producers and de Surville could only give instructions for cultivation from seed through a ‘pantomime of gestures’. Other introductions were successful, however, and by 1810 potatoes were being grown in quantity right across the country, from the Bay of Islands to the shores of Te Ara a Kiwa Foveaux Strait. Turnips and cabbage were also widespread; cultivated in some places but also proliferating in wild forms.

As trading opportunities expanded, Māori gardeners began cultivating a wider range of introduced plants. Vegetables such as cabbages, pumpkins, marrow, onions, parsnips, carrots, cucumbers, radishes and watermelons were grown throughout the motu and sold to European settlers and visitors, although none on such an extensive scale as the potato. For their own consumption most hapū favoured those foods that could be cooked by existing methods: potatoes, turnips, cabbage, pumpkin, marrows and maize. These supplemented existing food sources but did not supplant them, and food such as aruhe, kūmara and taro were still prevalent. The kō, a wooden digging stick, was the main tool used in gardening in all areas until the introduction of metal hoes, spades and mattocks – which, like the kō, were used by groups working in unison in one field.

By the 1840s hapū in Te Ika-a-Māui had been able to observe missionaries growing, milling and using wheat, and they had sufficient capital to invest in ploughs and water-powered mills. Governor George Grey actively encouraged this investment and gifted carts, horses and ploughs to rangatira, believing that if Māori were engaged in agriculture their property would ‘be too valuable to permit them to engage in war’. This commercial farming was carried out communally, and by 1855 iwi in Thames and the Waikato were cultivating sufficient produce to supply Auckland with more than 80,000 bushels of wheat and 30,000 bushels of maize.

From this peak, Māori food production declined rapidly in the late 1850s, as land became exhausted, ‘unwholesome seeds’ contaminated wheat and flour, and the Australian food import market collapsed. Other significant factors were what Alan Grey describes as the ‘discouragements and devastation of war’, which deprived iwi in the central North Island of their best agricultural lands and shattered the economies of many tribes. The Waitangi Tribunal’s Ngāti Awa Raupatu Report, for example, traces the impact of land confiscations on Ngāti Awa hapū: it notes that after the raupatu – the indiscriminate government confiscation of land in the wake of the New Zealand Wars – they lost their best cultivatable land, trading vessels and mill, and were forced to relocate to flood-prone blocks close to the military settlement at Whakatāne. While there were signs of recovery in the 1870s, Māori communities lacked the access to development finance, infrastructure and training opportunities that would have allowed them to make the move from arable agriculture to more profitable pastoralism.

Large-scale commercial cropping did not return to pre-war levels, but Māori communities continued to cultivate gardens for local use, and to fulfil their customary obligations. Ngāti Hineuru witnesses for The Mohaka ki Ahuriri Report recall that by the early twentieth century potatoes were their staple crop – mostly a very hardy type called parakaraka. Claimants from Te Tau Ihu told the Waitangi Tribunal of the importance of their gardens, particularly as other food supplies such as tāwhara (fruit of the kiekie) and karaka berries became scarce. Paul Morgan, who grew up on a small farm at Motueka in the 1920s and 1930s, reported in evidence on behalf of Ngāti Rārua that ‘you could live out of your garden and there was still strong mahinga kai in terms of puha, watercress and seafood. Aside from basics like flour, tea and sugar, our families survived [with] very little need of the grocery store.’ Te Maata Gilbert recalls in testimony on behalf of Ngāti Tama that he was taught strict tikanga for gardening by his grandfather, such as always returning the first of the crops to Papatūānuku. Gardening knowledge was passed down from generation to generation and crops were carefully tended by the whole community, as a successful garden was a matter of both pride and necessity.

Settlers also drew on centuries-old gardening traditions, and they too faced challenges in adapting their practices to suit local conditions. The first missionaries at the Oihi mission near Rangihoua pā planted a kitchen garden in 1815, but soon found that the location on a clay hillside was unsuitable for gardening. The missionaries at Kerikeri had more success with seeds and plants they brought from New South Wales in 1819, and by 1822 they had nearly 3000 square metres set aside for vegetables and fruits. Their kitchen garden boasted a remarkable variety of plants, including peas, hops, turnips, carrots, radishes, cabbages, potatoes, lettuce, red beets, broccoli, endive, asparagus, cress, onions, celery, melons, berries, citrus fruits, pumpkins, cucumbers, apples, pears, and a range of herbs. The gardens at Paihia, probably established using seeds and plants from Kerikeri, flourished under the ministrations of Richard Davis, a tenant farmer from Dorset who set out to make the missionaries more self-sufficient. In 1831 Davis moved to Waimate to manage the mission farm, and four years later, when visiting there, Charles Darwin described it most favourably as ‘a fragment of old England’. From 1840 settlers took up the task of introducing and fostering the growth of imported plant species. Horticultural societies were established in most major towns within a few years of Pākehā settlement, with the aim of spreading knowledge and fostering enthusiasm for gardening of all sorts. Some immigrants brought seeds and plants with them in their cabin luggage; others wrote home begging for packages of seeds, or took advantage of newly established nurseries. The temperate climate and rich soils meant they could grow a wide range of exotic vegetables to enhance an otherwise fairly monotonous diet.