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.
