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.