Prisoners grow thousands of plants for Taranaki steam-sides

Prisoners in the nurseries at Whanganui and New Plymouth Prisons are hard at work potting 86,000 plants for Taranaki Regional Council.

Corrections recently won a percentage of a large contract with the Council to grow native plants for its riverside, or riparian, planting programme.

The long-running programme assists landowners, mostly farmers, to fence and plant alongside their streams, thus helping to protect water quality and enhance the stream habitat. Corrections has been growing plants for the programme since 1996, supplying well over 500,000 plants over this time.

The prisoners are currently potting toe-toe, flax, cabbage trees, totara, pohutukawa and kowhai, among others.

A requirement of the contract is that the plants must be eco-sourced, meaning that the seed or cutting the plants are grown from must be collected from the area.

Plants grown from eco-sourced seed may have a greater chance of survival as they are already adapted to the locality. The practice also encourages diversity as varieties differ slightly from place to place.

Corrections Inmate Employment (CIE) Instructor Sheryl Clyma from New Plymouth Prison takes groups of carefully selected and supervised minimum security prisoners out to collect seed in summer and autumn.

“Prisoners then process and sow the seeds. They care for the seedlings and help despatch the young plants to planting contractors,” says Sheryl.

Like many of her CIE instructor colleagues in different prison industries around the country, Sheryl has a Level 5 Certificate in Adult Education, and teaches embedded literacy and numeracy skills at the same time as she teaches her specialist area.

Taranaki Regional Council’s Land Services Manager Don Shearman says the plants supplied by Corrections are of good quality and arrive on time.

“We have a very good working relationship with Corrections. In particular, Sheryl has always been very flexible about fitting in with our needs, holding plants for us if necessary,” he says.

Around forty prisoners in total work at the Whanganui and New Plymouth Prison nurseries. The practical work they do there counts towards their Level 2 National Certificates in Horticulture, a qualification that may give them a better chance of getting a job on release. In the 12 months to June 2011, 23 National Certificates in Horticulture were awarded to prisoners working in the New Plymouth and Whanganui Prison Nurseries.