Mad and Messy March

With activities, camps and, eventually the Covid-19 lockdown, March turned into a messy month but when we did get into the gardens, WOW, we worked hard.

Block 1

All these tamariki were with the programme last year. We talked about what we needed to do to start a garden – the students all said “Whaea Clare, we know”, so she said, “Go for it!”

Clare had seedlings, but the group decided they wanted to start from seed. They said the plants would grow stronger than if they used transplanted seedlings. We talked about observing your garden – seeing the changes, checking the sunlight, looking at your soil and seeing what the plants are doing.

Seeds sprouting.

By the following week the seeds were sprouting so we carefully watered them with diluted worm pee fertiliser. Then the beautiful compost from Revitial arrived and our gardeners decided to dilute that before applying it to their seedlings too. Diluting both of these sources of nutrition was important – we didn’t want to overwhelm such tiny plants with too many nutrients.

Rich and beautiful compost from Revital.

We also started looking into the area that we were going to do some landscaping in. Once again we talked about observing the area first. Do kids come and play here? Where is the sunlight? Is there a natural pathway? This is going to be a fascinating project.

Block 2

Hardly any of the tamariki in this group had done any gardening before – what an exciting learning adventure they are about to start!

Ms Barr and Whaea Clare began by explaining how to turn the soil and add nutrients into the gardens. They talked about the benefits of seaweed. One group got Ms Barr’s food scraps and learned how to ‘trench’. We looked at compost and worm bins, both great, free ways of recycling food and garden waste into nutrition for our gardens.

‘Trenching’

We also had fun getting the sprinkler system working and talking about how to save water over summer. We planted some seedlings into the bins – learning to soak them first in seaweed juice, worm pee or even just water, if that’s all there is available (here’s why we do it!).

Our least favourite thing was weeding and maintenance of the gardens – Whaea Clare explained that if we mulched the gardens this would be less of a worry.