Meal worm larvae on the menu at Sustainable Backyard Trail

Correction: This story has been updated to correct Melissa and Aaron Jacobson's surname.

A Taranaki garden festival that highlights working with nature - rather than against it - is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

The Sustainable Backyard Trail offers insights into medicinal herbs, composting human waste, raising mealworms, suburban food forests and everything in between.

At Rawhitiroa near Eltham, Melissa and Aaron Jacobson operate a closed-loop system at the 1.4 hectare Little Insect Farm.

The steep terraced property abounds in thriving gardens, but the showstopper is the composting toilet.

Urine is siphoned off and diluted with 1000 litres of water before being used for irrigation, taking advantage of the nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium.

Aaron explained 'numbers twos' were collected in buckets topped with wood chips, before being composted.

"We make one big one cubic metre giant hot compost really. At 65C it starts cooking those human pathogens like e-coli and we've pretty much got it down to an art now where every 'load' gets up to sometimes 68C, 69C, so we know the e-coli in our number twos has been taken care of."

It took 40 buckets to make a single batch of compost which took nine months to cure, before the Jacobsons distributed it onto shelter belts at the property rather than in the garden.

Inside, Melissa Jacobson - a trained entomologist - had a demonstration meal worm farm.

She retrieved some larvae.

"This is the stage that humans would eat. Chickens can eat any stage, but this is the bit that you eat and they're delicious.

"Again it's a mindset thing. We've been to the A&P Show and stuff before and I've had to cook 500-600 worms because people loved them. We just offered taste tests.

"I've had people say they taste mushroomy. I don't think so. They're more nutty and someone said they tasted like pork crackling."

A source of protein, the larvae were dry roasted after first being chilled to kill them humanely.

In the foothills of the Pouakai Ranges, Cat Neale - a naturopath and herbalist - was also encouraging taste testing at the Medicine Place.

"So, I'm working with the concept that they call organoleptic understanding which is where we physically taste a herb and we literally feel what it is doing in our bodies.

"So, in the mouth it will either be cooling or drying. There'll be one of those sensations or it will be heating or moistening."

Neale said people had become disconnected from legitimate medicinal herbs.

"So, in this garden I'm really wanting people to almost to have their mind blown as to 'oh my goodness in almost every single square metre there's actually a medicine plant or at least an edible plant that we may not have been identifying as such."

Neale has carefully labelled as many as 60 herbs with their particular qualities.

In New Plymouth, Kevin Hoskin had levelled a classic English garden in favour of what he called the Flamingo Food Forest.

He is employing syntropic agroforestry principles which involve companion planting and creating stratified layers to form a productive forest.

"So, for this line for example I've got my macadamia, tamarillo and then I've got my eucalypts, figs, Japanese raisin and I've got a lot more support species. I've got Mexican sunflowers and I'm always on the lookout for things that grow fast and I can chop and drop."

The Sustainable Backyard Trial, which involved 24 gardens, dozens of workshops and numerous tours, runs from 1-10 November.

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