Northland is known for its beautiful beaches and fortunately for us we are surrounded by lots

and lots of turquoise sea water and golden sandy beaches. We collect our water from a

small beach nestled on the coastal highway called Cable Bay. Cable Bay is famous for

being the site where the very first telecommunication cable came ashore in New Zealand all

the way from Australia.

In high summer you will often find The Taipa Salt Pig team down at Cable Bay at high tide

collecting sea water using just a couple of stainless-steel buckets. It takes 22 buckets to fill

one of the three recycled olive barrels we use to transport the water from the beach to our

evaporators. It’s a decent workout at perhaps the most stunning natural gymnasium in the

country.

Once we get back to base its time to take a breath.

The water sits in the tanks for about 24 hours. It allows all the floaty bits to sink to the bottom and helps with the final filtration of the water before it goes into our main evaporation units.

Throughout this whole process we have had to learn and develop our processes from scrap. That has actually been one of the best parts of this whole process. At the time of writing this we have three different evaporator units with plans to expand. So here are the three units we have currently so you can get a feel for what we are doing.

This is our flagship unit hence the flagpole!

It’s an 8m X 2.4m poly tunnel supplied by Premier Tunnel Houses Ltd. I have to say I have been impressed with the unit, its held up to some fierce storms and looks as good as it did on the day my son and I constructed it.

It sits on a clay base we dug for it with a metal base. There is room to build more units on the platform which we intend to do over the next few months.

Inside it has a large evaporation tank lined with a water tank liner and around the outside of the main tank room for a further 31 smaller food grade plastic evaporation tanks.

This unit sits on part of our property known as Anvil knob, alongside our veggie garden. It gets sunshine from dawn to dusk and believe me it gets hot in there. We built this ourselves out of treated timber, pallet wood and clear plastic sheeting. It holds up to 44 of the small food grade plastic evaporation tanks.

This is the latest unit we have commissioned and the results so far are fantastic. It sits against a north facing retaining wall that also gets full sun all day. Our last batch which we put in on the 1st September saw us collecting salt in three weeks and six days, a new record.

I cant wait for full summer.

This unit holds 72 of the small food grade tanks. Our plan is to build two more identical units directly above this one.

So how do we get the water from the truck to the evaporators I hear you ask, you must be using a pump.

Well the answer is no.

Why consume power when you can use gravity. We simply syphon the water from the truck to the evaporators using a hose fitted with cloth filters to make sure no large particles can contaminate our salt.

Now its just a question of being patient.

We let the sun shine and let the water evaporate releasing masses of Oxygen and Hydrogen into the atmosphere, while locking all the other elements of sea water into our finely formed salt crystals. Sure we pop around each day and check in on each vat, but other than that its just about being patient.

After three weeks have passed we start to see crystallisation and over the following three weeks there is a continuos supply of fresh natural clean sea salt.