Blue Borage is a Franklin-based consultancy that teaches the art of making exquisite compost.
Katrina Wolff describes herself as an accidental kitchen garden consultant, an edible garden coach and a soilpreneur. She works with businesses, schools, homes gardeners – anyone who wants to make what she calls “exquisite soil”.
To do this, she says, the use of synthetic fertilisers or toxic weedkillers are most definitely out. Instead she teaches her clients how to creating a closed loop garden system with compost at its heart. Katrina has always been a gardener. At university she worked at Kings Plant Barn, but she stopped recommending snail bate a long time ago.
“I’m starting to call what I do compost literacy. We’ve lost it for probably three generations. Horticultural training programmes don’t teach composting.”
“It was probably through my children going to the Steiner school in Titirangi, that I was exposed to biodynamic gardening and got pulled in to that whole community. Many years and home gardens later I kind of became an accidental kitchen garden consultant.”
At some point she realised she could make a career out of it.
“This is what I loved to do, no-one else was doing it, and I asked myself ‘can I make it work?’. Then later, during the pandemic, I had to take it online. So through 2020-2021 the online school was born and grew quickly. Now, I have over 1000 students all over the world,” she says.
The business was named Blue Borage because the plant and its flowers are great compost activators, as well as being loved by pollinators.
“I wanted it to be bee-friendly and biodynamic.”
Today Katrina teaches online courses in hot composting, edible gardening, holistic weed management and family-friendly biodynamics.
But it’s what she does on the ground in Franklin that she really loves.
In the district itself she offers in-house training for workplaces, holiday programmes for schools and community groups, and she has also established a pollinator garden at Tuakau Museum.
“I have an agreement with them that they won’t spray in that patch. We have 30 different varieties of dahlia, and all kinds of other plants. People are staring to come in and go ‘wow’.”
Katrina is also the edible garden coach for Ceres Organics at their headquarters in Mt Wellington. Something she says she would like to replicate in Franklin.
“I’m doing a year long project with them and I go in once a month and teach their staff something about their workplace garden. They have got a garden committee of 15 people who each get access to one of my online courses, so they can use those skills. Once a season we go out and visit an urban farm or community project on the ground. Our first trip was to Ōrākei Marae to the ethnobotanical garden.”
Katrina has also trained in the Hua Parakore initiative, a kaupapa Māori system for kai atua – pure (organic) foods. Here she met Grace Van Den Brink, who is kaitiaki of the community gardens in Waiuku, which are run by the charity Marama Hou Ministries Trust.
Katrina has been invited to volunteer as a speaker at the gardens when Grace brings people sent by Corrections to work community hours.
“I’m always looking at what Katrina is learning and she learns from what I have been doing here, and she’s asked if she can bring classes out to look at the hot composting we have here,” Grace says.
Katrina says it was wonderful to see these people’s eye’s light up when she explained to them how they could start home gardens, feed their families healthy kai, and save money that would otherwise be spent at the supermarket.
“It’s probably Grace helping me more than me helping her. When I talked to the group about how our ancestors grew food without chemicals, everyone was just overcome with tingles that they could be part of a better system.”
