30 July 2025
Baking and Breaking Bread
Kaiahuwhenua Grower.
WRITER: Felicity Connell
photographer: Francine Boer
Katherine Mitchell, a hunter, fisher, gardener, cook and charter boat business manager, is deeply passionate about understanding where food comes from and making the most of every bite. Through a local community garden and her cooking classes, she shares her skills with others, fostering connections, enhancing well-being and raising awareness of food resilience.
Katherine says that her classes have given participants “confidence to try new things and reconnected them with the idea of playing with food and it being something that should be fun and not a chore. I often feel with food that you are missing such a piece in life if you can’t take joy in the food you’re eating.”
In late 2019, Katherine, 42, and her husband, Paul, known as Mitch, 46, found themselves at a crossroads. Their tourism- focussed helicopter business in Tāhuna Queenstown had taken a downturn, prompting a decision to move to Te Anau with their children, six-year-old Rita and nine-year-old Austin. “It was the most amazing thing to leave Queenstown and come to this – I call it my desert island after the storm. It’s a very cool little town and nice to be back to rural roots and away from that Queenstown hustle and bustle.” The untamed beauty of Te Rua-o-te–Moko Fiordland is a constant inspiration for Katherine. “I guess it’s a bit cliché, but it’s so untouched and kind of primaeval. It’s a little bit like stepping back in time and there’s no choice but to be connected to nature. There are parts when you’re right up the head of the fiords, it feels like a dinosaur’s going to walk out of the bush. It’s beautiful, overgrowing, lush forest. People think Fiordland is rainy and wet, but you can get days – especially in Breaksea and Dusky Sounds – like you’re on tropical islands. You can’t get bored of it. It’s different every time you go there.”
“Gardening is a great thing for ADHD because it’s okay to get distracted by things all the time. You see the weed, you pull it out, you go down a wee rabbit hole there and you go and do something else. Your hands are as close to the earth as you can be. So yeah, it’s very grounding.”
Katherine and Mitch now manage Fiordland Charters. Although her work with the charter boat often takes her to sea, Katherine’s roots are firmly in the land. Raised in Ōtautahi Christchurch with school holidays spent on family farms, she earned a Bachelor of Agriculture from Te Whare Wānaka o Aoraki Lincoln University and built a career in the primary sector. Her passion for food from the land has remained a constant. A keen gardener, she helped set up the Fiordland Community Garden Charitable Trust in 2020. Passing on gardening skills is only one part of the venture. “A big part of it is local community resilience, mental health and just bringing people together. Food is a real connector and growing is a great leveller. We have eighteen-year-olds, young mums with babies, and elderly show up. Knowledge is shared across the group and it’s very cool. It’s about connecting with each other. There’s something about busy hands allowing you to chat and relax and let go, and just holding space for those opportunities. It’s also important in terms of resiliency in the community, I’m not a doomsdayer, but it is important we can look after ourselves if we need to. We are very isolated, and we’ve only got one road in and one road out, and one supermarket.”
As well as resilience, celebrating what you have grown is important to Katherine. “Autumn might be one of my favourite seasons because it’s that harvest abundance and also slowing down for the garden. It’s when you start harvesting and preserving. I often lament that our Pākehā culture doesn’t celebrate coming together in autumn. And again, we all strive for this perfection of preserving all our fruit and things like that. But the reality is, if you look back at history, we did it as a community. It wasn’t something that you sat alone in your kitchen with your two children screaming at you while you did it. It was something you came together as a group and did. And I’d like to think we can come back to that.”
Continue reading the full story in our Takurua Winter 2025 Edition.
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This story appeared in the Takurua Winter 2025 Edition of Shepherdess.
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