Presenting…Our New Garden Beds

A huge change has happened in the garden club this month. Thanks to Bunnings we have 14 new garden bins! As you might have read in our last blog post, the Bunnings crew came one Wednesday morning to help us and our 10 volunteers build our new garden beds.

It was so exciting seeing them grow from a pile of wood into rows of beautiful new bins. It was hard work but a lot of fun, and some of us even learnt new skills along the way too.

The following Saturday we had another working bee to fill up the garden bins with the soil from the old bins. We layered the bins up with tree branches and leaves from around the kura and then piled the soil on top of them. The branches and leaves will slowly decompose, turning into a valuable source of carbon for our soil. When we got tired we had some shared kai until we were full to bursting.

As our garden club was a construction site for many weeks, we spent the term learning about seeds and doing experiments. We learned how varied their appearances can be (we matched seeds to their parent plants); how they germinate (we took home bean seeds in a see-through cup so we could watch them germinate); what factors help with germination (we soaked some seeds in water before planting to see if they grew stronger than seeds that hadn’t been soaked). So although we weren’t out in the garden, we still did gardening of a different sort.

One week Leo from Why Waste came to visit and taught us all about worms. Whaea Clare read that if there are at least 20 worms in your garden it means it’s healthy, so we decided to do a worm count around the school. No one found any worms! But we found some kumara and potatoes…

We had planned to use these for our end-of-term/garden club re-opening party, but because the kura is closed we can’t do that now. So Whaea Clare is going to plant them in a bucket and let them grow. Maybe we’ll get even more potatoes and kumara that we can use to make a Matariki soup in winter.

We were still left with a big question: “how we are going to get more worms in our gardens?”. There were some great ideas: more compost, digging in worm pee and vermicast, adding seaweed, doing more mulching. We’ll try all these things, and in Term 4 we’ll do another worm count and see if our efforts have worked.

It’s sad we had to close down our garden club, and then our whole kura because of the Covid-19 lockdown, but we know it’s to keep everyone safe. Prior to the rahui Whaea Clare did one last check on the gardens and guess what? Nasturtium and poppy seeds had germinated and were growing, all by themselves. Whaea Clare also sprinkled some seeds into the gardens and put pea straw on top to mulch the bins, so who knows what we’re going to find when we get back. We might get some really exciting surprises!

In the meantime, take care and stay safe.