Kāpiti Coast’s Greenest Street: Growing the future - By Stacey Gasson

Joe Simmonds doesn’t actually live in Rainbow Court, but his mum Angie does. And he’s left his mark on the community in the shape of a series of garden beds. Rainbow Court is Raumati South’s entry in Kāpiti Coast District Council’s Greenest Street competition, in which participating streets work as a community to reduce their collective environmental footprint over nine months.

Joe is a 22-year-old website designer who started gardening less than a year ago after “getting paranoid” about peak oil and climate change. Despite being already motivated by his passion for ‘the big picture’ (to the degree that he became vegetarian at 8), Joe says a nightmare in which he was run down by an oil tanker “kickstarted something in my brain – changed my entire outlook on everything”.