Greenbridge Keen Supporter of Sustainable Backyards Trail
Greenbridge Trail Blazer Sponsor 2021
The official launch of this year’s Trail is in July so be sure to follow us! This year boasts 15 new properties, a variety of talks and demonstrations hosted by enthusiastic home gardeners. For the first time, we are running events alongside the trail, including an e-bike tour, frocks on bikes, & a speaker evening.
Greenbridge is one of our main sponsors again this year, and owners, Bena and Dan, are opening their inspiring garden to the community. They have a wealth of experience to share, as well as their exciting new business ventures, including Healthy Home Plans.
Read about last year’s Trail and Dan and Bena’s property.
The Sustainable Backyards Trail celebrated its 5th Anniversary in the spring of 2020. A huge thanks to Greenbridge, a multi-disciplined design business with a varied team of regenerative specialists who are passionate about sustainability. Their team supports homeowners and farmers alike to develop their properties into regenerative landscapes using permaculture principles. They are also a key task force in larger community resilience projects regionally and nationally. Find out more about their exciting work and their latest offering.
Greenbridge on the Taranaki Sustainable Backyards Trail
A bit about the property:
We bought our land about 9 years ago but didn’t start developing up to about 7 years ago. It’s a 10-acre-block and it was a bare piece of eroded pastural landscape that needed lots of work, and we chose it because we wanted a challenge!
When we purchased this property, we had over a decade of designing and project managing property work, and we’d already trained in permaculture. We thought we had a lot of knowledge, but it was still quite difficult to go through the process ourselves.
Filtering through the greenwash that’s around was a challenge and that’s where the name Greenbridge came from, a bridge to finding things that were sustainable.
We aimed for a woodland approach where about 70% of the landscape is covered in vegetation of some sort, whether its orchards, food forests or high value forestry. Our orchard has around 100 fruit, nuts and berries - so that’s enough to feed 3 families.
Why did you decide to build the house down a slope?
It’s very unusual to put a house down a slope like we have done, but there’s a thermal vouch about 1/3 of the way down the slope, where it’s warm and sheltered. An ineffectively insulated house loses about 30% of the heat, and by dropping it here we often have it really warm inside even with the doors and windows open. This is a permaculture approach that is quite effective. Terracing also creates lots of habitats along the edges, distributes the water in the landscape and creates accessways.
What inspired you to start Green Bridge?
We started developing the property after leaving a successful business in Wellington. We knew we wanted to do something that helped the environment, but we didn’t know exactly what that meant. We spent a year or two exploring options and did a lot of retraining before we began Greenbridge, and right from the outset we wanted to develop the property like a regenerative oasis and a demonstration site to what you can do sustainably and regeneratively in Taranaki.
We are very passionate about helping farmers regenerate their landscapes and making the regeneration of their farms actually profitable and beautiful while looking at farmer wellbeing, using regenerative philosophies and techniques to improve profitability, as well as ecological performance.
What are some common questions customers ask when they start the process with you?
The most common questions when someone purchases a lifestyle block are: Where do you put your house? Where do you put your orchard? Where are your access ways and your sheds? And all of those things are addressed in our scale designs for our clients.
If somebody is wanting to develop a property, it’s best to start with the broad scale. Looking at the big picture, called “patterns to detail” from a permaculture perspective.
As you do little bits of your project, you keep the big picture in mind - that means you make less mistakes.
What are your most exciting projects this year and why?
Most of our projects are local and it’s purposeful because we love our community and we love Taranaki. We only travel for projects that we see as worthwhile such as the 19-house cohousing project in Karikari, which is really a wonderful project for us as a business because it blends the homes and the landscapes.
What motivated you to join the SBT this year?
Greenbridge is an impact enterprise. That means that we trade in business that does good in the spheres of social, environmental and financial, and we support charitable trusts or likeminded businesses. We’ve supported the SBT from the first year - it’s so exciting! This year we are also on the trail and that is a great incentive for getting some new projects done.
Some of our talks will be about edible gardens and food forests, regenerative farming, and one of my favourite topics: trees in the landscape - we’ll cover all sorts of things there: shelter, what type of shelter, the different types of species, high value forestry, firewood lots, and specimen trees.
One of the things that I’ve noticed about hosts that participate in the SBT is that they are very passionate about sustainability and about sharing their knowledge.
Learn more about Greenbridge and the Taranaki Backyards Trail. Be sure to mark your calendar for their opening hours and workshops.
