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.