Planting and Composting
It was so busy in the garden club today. Room 11’s Little Gardens were ready to plant, so today they didn’t split up into their usual groups but stayed together to plant them instead. As well as sunflower plants they are growing courgettes, tomatoes and corn, which will be ready to eat when we come back. Whaea Clare is going to take pictures so we can see how they go.
Look what we’ve grown from seeds! Time to get them in the garden where they can really take off.
Meanwhile the Frangapani group got to work on the garden bins that are in the shady spots in the garden. We need to plant things in these bins that don’t mind growing in the shade. We learned that the crops we grow for their leaves (for example: kale, lettuce and spinach) and those we grow for their roots (like beetroot and carrots) tend to do better in shadier conditions than the ones we grow for their fruit (such as tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins and kumara).
Frangipani also planted a couple of bins with cover crops. The job of a cover crop is to replenish the soil so that it’s healthy and full of goodness for the next time we plant in it. We usually dig these plants back into the soil once they're fully grown, where they release their nutrients into the earth. So although it can seem a bit odd that we are filling these bins with plants that aren’t even going to give us a harvest, a good way to think of it is that a cover crop is growing a harvest for the soil, instead of for us – and that seems only fair!
The Sunflower group were planting sunflowers (what else?!) around the edges of the garden club. Not only will they look beautiful and provide our manu with food in the form of sunflower seeds, but they also deter pests from the garden.
And the Cosmos group were composting with Leo. We had made loads of compost from waste from our gardens and lunch boxes. It felt good to distribute it to all the garden bins and the citrus grove, feeding the plants and soil with something we had made from stuff that would have otherwise gone to the tip.
A beautiful day to be out and busy in the garden.