A community garden in Greerton built by offenders on community based sentences is helping to supply a community cooking programme.

People at the opening of the garden in October.

The garden on Chadwick Rd grows food for the Work and Living skills course ‘KFC' or Kai For Cheap.

This is a cooking course run at the community work centre looking at cooking healthy food on a budget.

The garden is named Te Rourou, which means weaved flax plate or basket.

The name is derived from the whakatauki, ‘naaku te rourou naau te rourou ka ora ai te iwi' which translates to ‘with your (food) basket and my (food) basket, the people will thrive'.

'Built and planted by offenders while completing their community work sentences, plants were donated by Spring Hill Corrections Facility horticulture training yard, along with community organisations and staff,” says Community Corrections Tauranga community work team services manager Karen van der Zee.

The garden was officially opened in October by Minister Simon Bridges, who commended the team involved for the 'tremendous piece of positive work.”

He spoke about the changes to what was very barren piece of land to a resource that will have a positive effect on the local community.

'Community Corrections Tauranga has had fantastic support from The Good Neighbours Trust who has provided fantastic support and advice.

'As per their recommendation the gardens are built to be sustainable using a ‘lasagne gardening' technique of layering.

'As with all gardening, the quality of the soil is paramount and the raised beds will result in longer seasons of produce being produced. The garden beds also have their own inbuilt watering system developed to conserve resources throughout the summer.”

Along with The Good Neighbours Trust, the gardens have also been supported by Fridolin Katalin who donated a beehive, and Deb McCarthy from Merivale Community Garden who donated a worm farm.

Tauranga Community Corrections regularly feature as a site with the highest number offenders participating in Work and Living Skills programmes.

Many offenders simply do not have essential life skills and this leads to their offending.

One of the ways Corrections is helping community-based offenders to stay out of trouble is by ensuring that more of them do Work and Living Skills training as part of their sentence. Corrections have set a target of 10,000 offenders completing WLS by 2017.