Roebuck Farm - where the garden beds are rich 'like chocolate cake'

With soil that's soft "like butter" and garden beds that are rich like "chocolate cakes", Jodi Roebuck seems to have found a winning recipe on his 3-hectare block in Omata, just 10km south of New Plymouth.

It's taken over two decades for Jodi, wife Tanya and their family to transform the once bare paddock into a lush market garden, with three greenhouses, a wash and packhouse, a homestead and an agritourism business.

"We've built the family farm with our family from scratch," Jodi tells Country Life.

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Jodi is an internationally-renowned biointensive gardening educator and restoration grazing consultant. He's spent the past three decades travelling the world learning from and teaching others.

Though Taranaki's fertile soils provided a good starting base, Jodi began converting the paddock by building up organic matter in the soil through adding compost and cover crops.

"Carbon's really one of the key inputs," he says.

"It's still the key part of our production for having beautiful coloured, gorgeous tasting produce."

Jodi was also an early adopter of regenerative agriculture practices - a holistic approach which emphasises greater biodiversity and protecting soils.

It's about covering the ground at all times, he says.

"Deep living soil allows you to grow more plants in that area."

Roebuck Farm currently runs four successions of vegetables in the ground and six inside the greenhouses. They also run a few dozen sheep which graze on the property and neighbouring land.

Buckwheat has proven a particularly helpful cover crop due to it being drought resistant, fast growing and helping attract beneficial insects, Jodi says.

"Everything we cut off and compost and drill the next cover crop."

Using a shade net over freshly planted patches also helps protect the soil from potential hail or intense heat.

Though not using all garden beds currently, due to lower demand linked to weaker economic conditions, he keeps them covered.

"We know we can produce more food as our sales allow us to. It's not that we need more land, we need more sales."

A core part of the business is the microgreens Jodi grows - three different coloured radishes and one daikon variety.

He stacks the seedling trays after they've been sown and watered to ensure more even germination.

This helps with tracking their days to maturity and knowing when the microgreens will be ready, he says.

"A big part of being small-scale, it's common to go to a restaurant and say 'I'd love to produce this for you and I'm a half-acre' and they're like how could you possibly grow enough and be consistent.

"And for us, the consistency really comes from understanding how long things are currently taking to grow and then the flexibility with salad mix."

Jodi supplies microgreens, along with about 20 different vegetables over the summer, to six restaurants, three supermarkets, and two retail stores in Taranaki, which he or the family deliver themselves.

"We don't want anything in our chiller, we want it across town."

He currently produces about 120kg of salad greens each week.

"It's called leaves and shoots salad ... but you'll probably never see the same version ever again."

Despite selling most of what he and his family grow, Jodi said their garden was no different to any other home garden.

They use only hand tools to pick and process the vegetables, and the whole farm is "run off battery drills".

Jodi says the key is to do "a little bit of work regularly" and "plant a little bit often".