Wairarapa - Stories from the ground

Vagabond Vege

Alongside a range of community focussed initiatives, we run the Wellington Regional Fruit and Vege Co-op in partnership with Public Health and community groups. The Co-op is a not-for-profit ‘buyers collective’ delivering affordable access to fresh fruit and vegetables across the Wellington Region.

Every week, as a collective, we buy approx. 8 tonnes of fresh seasonal fruit and vegetables from local suppliers and growers. Because we buy in bulk we get them for a good price. This means we can sell a pack to our members for $15 - much less than they would cost in a supermarket. We have 10 co-ops running packing hubs and nearly 40 pickup points across the region from Petone to Masterton and Newtown to Ōtaki. The Co-op provides over 1,250 fruit and vegetable packs every week. See more at www.hauorakai.nz

We care about the health of our communities and providing a more affordable way for our members to include more fresh healthy fruit and vegetables in their diet is a great way to lift our community and improve health outcomes for our whānau. You can see our locations here.

If you are keen to know more about our work or to join, visit us at www.hauorakai.nz

Connect with us on our Facebook page to get regular updates.

Wairarapa Community Centre

Our 'Food Resilience Wairarapa' offers three programmes to the vulnerable people in the communities.

1. Community Kitchen

We take donated food from supermarkets and other sources, and with a team of volunteers we produce home cooked nutritious meals for those that need them in an emergency. 8000+ home cooked meals are produced every year and distributed via social agencies.

2. Community cooking classes:

We run scheduled cooking classes, and classes as requested by our social-agency partners. These provide people with the skills they need to create nutritious meals at home.

3. Grow programme - Community gardens:

We teach people how to grow food – vegetables, fruit, berries, chickens and eggs. We also run free community workshops, for example use of herbs, how to espalier fruit trees, etc.
To gain further information on what we do please contact us on:

Email info@wcct.co.nz

Little Farms

Little Farms is an organic market garden and provider of a collaborative vegetable box based in Masterton, Wairarapa.We started a market garden in 2019, when we couldn't find locally grown organic food to purchase. Along our growing journey we actually discovered that there was plenty of organic produce being grown in the Wairarapa, it was just being sent to the larger cities and not offered for sale locally. When we started providing our produce in vegetable boxes in 2020, we began working with other organic growers to sell their produce alongside ours in collaborative Farm Boxes. This model has become amazing for resilience.  We now have 7 growers contributing to our boxes, which means that if one farm gets hit with a loss of a crop or adverse weather event, the other farms have enough produce that we can still provide a weekly box to our customers. It also takes the pressure of the individual growers to be producing a wide variety of produce every week of the year, the farms naturally take turns at producing less, and the boxes are able to continue. 

You can support our farmers by ordering one of our Farm Boxes at www.wearelittlefarms.com and you can follow along on our growing journey at https://www.instagram.com/wearealittlefarm/