Arataki School Gardens Term 1, 2025

In term 1, we have been working with the New Entrant gardeners as well as one of our senior classes.  We began with an introduction to the gardens - the worm farms are always a hit and our young gardeners were keen to feed them every week. They quickly learn that the worms and their castings are not a stinky, dirty part of the garden, but the clever composters who recycle our food waste and help us build healthy, organic soil!

We started with the basics of seed sowing, sowing beans in pots for the young gardeners to tend to in their classrooms.  They loved seeing the beans we planted in ziplocs too, so they could watch for the shoots and roots.  After just a couple of weeks, we had bean seedlings which had grown large enough to plant out.  We built tipis and planted beans at the base of each stake.  The next task was to clear the summer garden bed and plant out some beetroot and silverbeet seedlings.  The gardeners refreshed the beds with ‘black gold’ from our compost bays and watered them vigorously every week!

The dry summer has had its advantages though, allowing us to gather lots of dry seed heads for seed saving - the perfect chore for little hands.  Our gardeners loved comparing the different seed sizes and shapes.  Marshmallow flower seeds were the favourite - just like mini donuts!!  We made origami envelopes to store our seed, so that we can plant our own seed again next year.

Our seniors did great work maintaining the fruit trees, by pulling kikuyu from around the bases of the trees and ensuring that the mulch was not harming the tree bark.  They then shovelled worm castings from our worm farms and diluted them to make buckets of rich organic liquid feed for our trees.  They also helped with chopping up our wonderful harvest of pumpkins to share with our school whanau from the pataka kai built in their classroom with Matua Mike.  We learned a great trick from Diane, who lent us her bone-handled butter knife, which proved super efficient for cutting through the tough pumpkins!

Our seniors did great work maintaining the fruit trees, by pulling kikuyu from around the bases of the trees and ensuring that the mulch was not harming the tree bark.  They then shovelled worm castings from our worm farms and diluted them to make buckets of rich organic liquid feed for our trees.  They also helped with chopping up our wonderful harvest of pumpkins to share with our school whanau from the pataka kai built in their classroom with Matua Mike.  We learned a great trick from Diane, who lent us her bone-handled butter knife, which proved super efficient for cutting through the tough pumpkins!

During this hot, dry term, there has been a constant need for watering, Our loyal lunchtime gardeners, led by Lukas, who manned the hose, dragged watering cans and pushed wheelbarrows over to the tap and back, ensuring that our gardens got a drink (not a swim!) at least once a week!

Our snail vine creeper has enjoyed the summer though and is flowering really well!

The highlight of the term for many of our young gardeners was harvesting the strawberry popping corn!  They loved the ruby red cobs and were super excited to cook them up on the camping stove in the garden shed!  We had songs to entertain us and once they smelled the popping corn, they told me “this is how they do it in the movies!”.  They were delighted to sit together and share bags of the popcorn that they had harvested! 

The flowers in our garden are attracting monarch butterflies too and we have been watching the caterpillars carefully, hunting out their hidden chrysalises.  We look forward to seeing more butterflies next term.

Term 4 in the Arataki School gardens

We welcomed our Hikurangi classes to the gardens in Term 4 and they were super enthusiastic!  With the Garden and Art Festival in week 4 of the term, there was lots to be done so that we could share what we do with our visitors.  

In preparation for the festival, we had a very successful working bee one Sunday, organised by the Friends of the School.  The surrounding fences were all magically transformed with a coat of black paint.  The fruit trees with their new wooden surrounds and hand painted signage were mulched, and there was some huge progress made with weeding and watering.  ‘Mā tini mā mano, ka rapa te whai’.

We decided to try an experimental pea straw bale garden, next to a regular garden bed, planting each with the same veg, so that we could see which garden turned out the best produce…  time will tell!

We have also planted some heritage seeds again, with hue and kamokamo acting as ground cover below our sunflowers.  We are also looking forward to the ‘treasure hunt’ for kumara in term one next year, and the kumara patch is looking promising.

The visitors we guided through the gardens over the four days of the Garden and Art festival were super impressed with what the young gardeners have achieved.  They left with ideas about how to make slug traps, paint strawberry decoys, practice companion planting, seed saving and more!  It was awesome to have such positive feedback.

This term we cleared beds to plant sunflowers and strawberry popping corn with beans and squash and they have really taken off!  We have plans to bring in a camping stove and make popcorn as soon as the cobs have grown and dried! 

Our tree stump flower gardens are flourishing too, with sweet peas and lavender and calendula and the butterflies and bees love them.  We are fortunate in having plenty of visiting bees from the neighbour’s hive over the fence, busy pollinating our gardens for more productive fruit and veg!

We harvested the last of the cauliflower and romanesco broccoli and the gardeners happily munched on them in the gardens as well as piling the kai basket with produce to share with our school community.

The carrot harvest was an exciting one too, lots of excited faces as they guessed what colour and size the next rainbow carrot might be!  And although they were small, we decided it best to dig up some spuds to take home before the holidays!

All the work we put into setting up our strawberry beds has really paid off and we have had some bumper harvests already this summer.  The mounded rows, topped with wool mulch matting seem to be the way to go!  Some of my hungry lunchtime gardeners did some taste testing and left happily with strawberry juice beards and full tummies!

To finish up for Christmas, our young gardeners got creative and made some beautiful air dried clay decorations, with a botanical theme.  Hopefully they all made it home in one piece!

Arataki School Gardens Term 3, 2024

Our Tuesdays this term were spent with the Montessori and Kopukairoa classes, and we have certainly got a lot done in the gardens. Our first task was to shift the Sentinel Garden from one end of the field to the other, so after digging and transporting countless barrow loads of soil and then carefully transporting plants, we called for help (thanks Brian!) to take the kiwifruit bin on a wobbly journey across the field to a new spot among the garden beds. It’s amazing how fast we can get things done, when we all work together!

Our next project was to renew the strawberry beds. We topped up the beds with our wonderful Arataki School compost and then planted the strawberries in mounded rows, topping them with upcycled wool packaging as mulch. Then strawberry decoys, painted from riverstones, were placed on top, to convince the birds that there is no reason to peck at the real ones, when they come on.

We also had a few wet days, which we used to full advantage, in the hall and the community room, learning about all sorts. The first subject was potatoes, and how to chit them. We tucked our little seed potatoes in under woolley mulch in trays and then left them in the garden shed, where the gardeners checked on them regularly to monitor how much the sprouts had grown.

Another big focus this term has been learning all about fungi, and some of the amazing kinds we have in Aotearoa. The gardeners were excited to tell us about their experiences of finding unusual specimens, like stinkhorn fungus and basket fungus. We are following up this learning with a garden project, to create NZ fungi using wooden stumps and fruit bowls by the sensory garden. The gardeners have done a wonderful job, of painting the stumps and lids, to represent some of Aotearoa’s amazing fungi.

We are very grateful to Resene who donated lots of testpots for the project! On each mushroom there will be a QR code that takes the viewer to information about that particular fungus. The students were really into it, and one of our gardeners even did a mushroom spore print at home and brought it in, to show us the following week!

We have had some amazing harvests of the beautiful romanesco broccoli and big heads of cauli. Some of our gardeners were amazed to discover how good they can taste raw, dipped in tasty hummus! One day, they got through five giant heads just snacking in the garden!

Our summer veg garden is another interesting project we have on the go. We are preparing two pea straw bales, by watering and feeding them with worm castings to add nitrogen. In week 1 of term 4, we will plant them out as straw bale gardens. The idea is that the decomposing straw provides a nourishing bed for our seedlings, which, due to the heat of the straw, should (hopefully) grow faster than they would if they were planted as usual in the garden bed. We plan to set up an experiment with our summer veg. creating one regular summer veg garden next to the pea straw gardens so that we can monitor the progress.

Arataki School Gardens Term 2, 2024

Ruma 13 from Kopukairoa joined with Mangatawa this term to take care of the school gardens.

At the beginning of the term they had a fun treasure hunt, digging in the garden beds, and managed to fill a basket with kumara to share with the school community at the front of the school.

Once the garden beds were topped up with beautiful black soil from Te Puke Landscapes, we started planting them out again.  We did careful rows of carrots, working hard to make sure they stayed watered during the week, so that they would germinate.  We also planted cauli and broccoli seedlings and sowed lots of broad beans, snowpeas and sugar snap peas straight into the garden beds.

This term, PiPS worked closely with Arataki School and applied to Tauranga City Council for funding to install a rainwater collection system at the school.  This will allow us to gather rainwater for our gardens, as well as for the school sandpit /water play area.  Our application was accepted and we hope to have it up and running by term 4!  This means that we won’t have to work so hard to keep our seedlings watered, lugging water from the tap to the shadehouse!  I’m sure our seedlings will be happier drinking rainwater too!

We made the most of the wet days, learning about our garden birds, in particular the native species.  The kereru was a hot favourite with his white singlet and his big ‘puku’ getting drunk on fermented berries and falling out of the trees.  The piwakawaka was also a contender for the most popular, because of their cute call and how they follow trampers through the bush… one of our  gardeners even told us that his nana is a piwakawaka and always stays close.   

The gardeners showed great passion for the birdlife and really enjoyed colouring them in and later taking part in the NZ bird survey on the last week of term.

What’s Been Happening in Term 1, 2024?

This term it was the students from Hopukiore and Mauao who joined me in the gardens on Tuesdays, with keen beans from other classrooms coming at lunchtimes too.

After a wonderfully sunny,  but dry summer, we started off term 1 with seed saving.  The dry weather had created the perfect conditions for us to collect seed.  We gathered all sorts; broccoli, kale, snapdragons, sunflower seed and more!  Then we popped them in envelopes and labelled them before storing them in our seed box in the shed for use next season.

It was also a term for some good harvests. We got lots of delicious tomatoes, some spuddies and so much pumpkin. The tomatoes were eaten on the spot, the spuds taken home, and the pumpkins divvied up for the kai cart..  But the one they loved most was popping the corn they grew in the shadehouse, yum!! 

Our big project this term has been completing the beautiful pathways between the beds in the sensory gardens.  We used salvaged house bricks, and bark mulch and pumice from Te Puke Landscape Supplies, the idea being that it gives the tamariki different sensory experiences underfoot. 

Initially I wasn’t convinced we would be able to do a good enough job…

 ..but our gardeners were amazing!  They planned, measured, designed the brick layout and did all the hard mahi.  They lugged bricks from the shed and dug out weeds as well as moving barrow loads of mulch and pumice.  We are so proud of what these amazing tamariki have achieved!!  Well done team!!

Garden Goodness in Arataki

The students from Hopukiore and Mauao  have been very busy in the gardens this term. Now that the growing season has kicked off, they have been enjoying the harvest! We’ve had some beautiful big hybrid cauliflowers, so we learned how to make hummus, to eat with the cauli florets straight from the garden beds.  They’ve also feasted on celery and have even had a few early strawberries!

We’ve also made the most of the very wet days, taking over the hall kitchen to make delicious green smoothies  with kale, mint, spinach and silverbeet from the school gardens!   Awesome to see our tamariki getting so excited about devouring their greens!  The office ladies got to test them out too and the teachers in the staff room were treated to a platter of veg and hummus from the gardens.

Our two compost bays are super-productive.  They take all of our gardens’ green waste, regular top ups of shredded paper, and used coffee grinds and continue to churn out barrow loads of black gold for our gardeners to top up the garden beds, reducing the need for more regular soil deliveries.  And there’s a constant dripping from our two worm farms as they top up tubs of wonderful organic liquid fertiliser - worm wee!  Our tamariki are learning the value of healthy organic soil and the giant cabbages, cauli and kale in the gardens are proof of how well it works.

Our shade house is full, with seedlings of all sorts.  We have planted sunflowers, capsicum, herbs, gourds, and to be planted out before the end of the term, so that they can grow over the holidays.  Our upcycled milk bottle watering cans seem to be doing the trick, as our dedicated gardeners take more ownership and visit the shade house regularly to ensure that their seedlings get looked after.

We have been letting our vegetable plants flower and go to seed once we have harvested the veg.  Although it means that the garden looks a bit wilder, we have been learning about the benefits of an untidy garden for the bees and pollinating insects.  We have also been hanging seed pods to dry in the shade house, and harvesting seed from the garden to plant again next year to continue the cycle.

 In each of the garden beds we have installed an ‘olla’, this is a simple, ancient watering system which allows water to seep slowly through terracotta pots into the surrounding garden beds. 

This encourages plants to sink deeper roots away from the dry surface of the garden beds.  This should help to see us through the drier months.  The tamariki have decorated the olla beautifully and taken advantage of the lids to create bee watering stations and bird baths for our garden visitors.

Towards the end of this term, our years 5 and 6 students got the opportunity to be involved with the Arataki Park Fruit Forest project.  We were invited by Tauranga Kai Resilience and Tauranga Council to help take care of the community fruit forest at our local park, in Arataki.  We met Tauranga City Arborists, Mark and Heme, who shared their passion for trees with us.  Next year we will create signage for these trees too.

Term 3 at Arataki School Gardens

The students from Kopukairoa have been doing some great mahi in the gardens this term. For the first three weeks the students worked with Whaea Emma, on composting and the importance of worms in the garden. They also planted green manure, maintaining the focus on soil health. Maeve was delighted to return to find so many keen gardeners in the group. They enjoyed watering the veggies and feeding them with worm wees from our worm bins. We even managed to empty a whole compost bay of black gold into our garden beds!

A big focus for us this term was on gardening in accordance with the Maramataka Calendar. The gardeners each made a Maramataka wheel, so that they could learn about how planting, feeding, watering and harvesting with the phases of the moon has advantages in organic gardening.

This cyclical approach is important as the gardens have both slow and productive times and it teaches us to work with those cycles, to the best advantage, using slower growth times to focus on other areas of preparation in the garden.

We explored different methods of planting too with potatoes, planting some directly into the garden beds and some in large pots, showing our gardeners that it’s not always necessary to have a big plot to grow kai. We are also waiting for our kumara to sprout, so that we can get another patch going for this year. Some of the young kai growers were keen to plant puha, and kamokamo, so that is the next project, watch this space!

We have had a few wet days this term too, which we managed to use for indoor activities. We made bird feeders to keep our garden visitors happy. We also had lots of fun making seed bombs in the hall, which we hope will result in some amazing wildflowers appearing throughout the neighbourhood in the coming term. The ‘bombers’ have promised to report back to let me know how successful they were.

Over the holidays, the compost bay will be getting a revamp, as the untreated pallets we use to contain it, have a limited life span. Hopefully we will soon have two compost bays up and running again. Meanwhile the worm farms are churning through our food waste making liquid gold for watering our new season’s seedlings. We are also hoping to get a basic watering system set up, near the tap at the sensory gardens and there are plans underway to work out a rainwater collection system using the roof of the garden shed or the shade house.

Winter Gardens with Mangatawa and Mauao

This term we have been working with the Mangatawa group and the Mauao rooms at Arataki.  Our lunchtime gardening crew are ever eager too and we often have a large group of keen gardeners, looking for jobs to do in the garden, once they’ve eaten lunch.

After the break, the green manure that we planted in some of the ‘resting’ garden beds last term needed to be dug in.  Our senior gardeners from rooms 22/23 and the lunchtime crew took care of this, slashing the plants and digging them into the soil to enrich it for the next planting.

Our worm farms are going really well and we are continually harvesting organic liquid fertiliser from them.  We use it to water our seedlings and for extra nourishment for our veggies in the garden beds.  We have been clearing out the old to make way for the new, piling the leaves and stalks from old harvests onto our compost heap for the insects and worms to busy themselves turning it into black gold for our gardens.

The harvest has been good too and we had quite the collection of pumpkins and kumara.  Digging for kumara was like a treasure hunt and brought joy to a lot of little faces!  Thanks to lots of help from the wonderful Diane, the harvest was made into a giant pot of soup, to feed our hungry lunchtime gardeners!  Well-earned!! The soup cups were then filled with potting mix to plant another round -butternut squash this time!  The pumpkins that didn’t make it into the pot were shared with school whānau at pick up time!

Our shadehouse has been a very busy spot.  We committed to sowing seeds on a regular basis, to keep a constant supply of seedlings for our garden beds.  This has been quite the challenge, as the shadehouse is without irrigation.  The solution : upcycled milk bottle watering cans and a host of keen gardeners who ensure that the seedlings are cared for from one gardening day to the next.

On those rainy days we have been taking advantage of some time indoors too.  Our Mangatawa groups have done lots of learning around seeds - types, dispersal and germination.  We also had a day in the community room doing some botanical prints and learning about leaves, what they do, why they change colour and how they benefit the plant. 

 We’ve been learning about bugs too - good and bad, and have made decoy cabbage white butterflies to deter the real ones from our veggie patch as they are territorial and won’t settle where they see others.

 We are looking forward to seeing Kopukairoa in the gardens in term 3.

Arataki Term 1, 2023

We returned to the school gardens after a wet summer, to find a jungle of overgrown beds, but thanks to the hard mahi of our lunchtime garden club, we have got some order on it again!  A big focus for us this term has been on feeding the soil and composting.

In preparation for some new planting, we have also planted green manure, a mix of plants which we will soon dig back into the soil to add nitrogen and revitalise our tired garden beds.  

We have started two new worm farms in the garden and it turns out that we have some super keen worm farmers in our new entrant classes who have been doing a wonderful job , feeding them with leaves from any overgrown greens and remembering to bring fruit scraps along.  We shred newspaper and add coffee grinds from our local cafes - thanks to Special Mention at Arataki shops and George at Omanu we have a constant supply!

With our shade house complete (thanks Steve!), we have a great space for starting our own seedlings, and the tamariki in Hikurangi are keen to visit at lunchtimes and break times, with their water bottles, to give their seeds a gentle watering. 

It’s looking more colourful in the orchard area too, as our gardeners have shown a wonderfully artistic side.  We asked them to create signage, so that everyone could identify the fruit trees.. We

 had no idea how beautifully they would do it!!  Amazing work!

Now that some veggie seedlings have been planted out, slug/snail control is underway, with mulch mats and slug traps set to deter them!

Our Montessori class have taken on a new project, setting up a sentinel garden as a part of a pilot project by Tauranga Moana Biosecurity Capital (TMBC).  Having planted species which attract invasive pests, they are now keeping track of any visitors to their garden and are ready to report any of their finds, as kaitiaki for our local area.

We have discovered more artistic gardeners too, this time among our new entrants, who were exploring the sizes and textures of various leaves they found in the garden, using them to create some beautiful watercolour leaf prints.

PiPS 2023 Autumn Fundraiser with SPRING BULBS

Help PIPS get more equipment for your school gardens by beautifying your garden and the community.

Here is a great opportunity to purchase spring flowering bulbs and seeds to show your support for your in-school garden programme. Bulbs are easy to plant, fun to grow and will reward you with gorgeous flowers year after year.

We have some great choices here - why not try them all!  Bulbs are supplied by GardenPost who source bulbs from New Zealand’s and Holland’s best growers. PiPS will make a least 30% profit on all sales.  A planting guide will be enclosed with each order.

To order: Click here to fill in the order form, then make payment via internet banking

- by 30th March 2023.

Payment to: 01 0475 0158776 00 PIPS Incorporated 

                     - Reference your name and school

Delivery: Will be around 10th April 2023. We can deliver nationwide, postal cost will be around $6.

Thank you for supporting PiPS – your in-school garden programme.  

Enquiries to: Clare Rodgers, pipstauranga@gmail.com