edible gardens are our jam
Habitate is here to help you create a beautiful home landscape that is full of diverse and delicious herbs and vegetables and is dripping with gorgeous fruit.
Habitate: verb. to live in an abundant, beautiful, deeply satisfying natural landscape.
We offer a range of garden and landscape consultations, design and installation services to suit your needs. For beginner gardeners keen to do it all, but not sure where to start, or needing help with the big decisions (such as where the put a glasshouse!). Or for busy families that need a full set up to start enjoying homegrown food the very next summer.
We work organically with wholistic permaculture design principles to make gardens that are rich and diverse. We create healthy living soils covered with beautiful ground cover plants. And when we make the whole garden hum with health, it is super satisfying to work in because, all of your actions have multiple benefits. We also love planting gorgeous native plants and naturalistic ornamental grass and herbaceous flower meadows. If this sounds like your kind of garden, get in touch to discuss the best way we can help.
Looking for super tasty, super healthy, fruit plants for your backyard?
Our nursery supplies delicious and easy to grow, disease resistant, fruit trees, berry plants, and orchard support plants – grown organically right here in Otago. We lovingly pack them and deliver them to your door at planting time each winter.
Our books and wall charts provide inspiration and decades of accumulated local knowledge for successful home food growing. We love to make these visually and pattern rich, so they are a pleasure to use and have in the house!
We run workshops, open days, garden tours and autumn fruit tasting events. Sign up for our seasonal newsletter or join our socials at the bottom of our homepage so you don't miss any!
Jason Ross runs Habitate and lives with his family in coastal Otago on a quarter acre packed with food. He is passionate about making food growing enjoyable for all. With a Fine Arts degree and decades of hands-on horticulture experience, he blends creativity with a deep love of nature to create thriving, resilient food gardens and educational publications. Inspired by wilderness, in his spare time you will find him in the surf, snow or hiking, and drawing plants in alpine meadows, swamplands, scrublands, and forests.
gardening mates:
Kath Irvine
Kath and I had the best time and creative collaboration on our book Homegrown Fruit. I highly recommend that you check out her website and sign up to her passionate newsletter for incredibly valuable info about backyard food growing!
"Kath Irvine is an organic gardener, author, and longtime advocate for edible gardens. She’s been teaching food growing to Kiwi gardeners for 25 years. Easy-to-understand, low-cost, simple strategies are her specialty, so that anyone in any situation can grow their own food. She is the author of two bestsellers – Pruning Fruit Trees: A Beginner’s Guide and The Edible Backyard."
Rory Harding
We are lucky to have Rory work with us on Habitate nursery and garden projects. Get along for a garden tour of George Street Orchard to see how much diversity and food can be packed creatively and gorgeously into a small inner city yard!
"I am passionate about contributing to a regenerative local food system, specifically within the fields of mixed fruit production and no-till vegetable growing. I am committed to the process of designing and managing landscapes so that they are cost effective, beautiful, scalable, and make the most of our energy and material inputs."