MMI School Gardens Term 3, 2024
This term started with harvesting amazing black gold from our compost heap, to top up our gardens. A cross section of the compost looked like a layer cake, with amazing rich compost at the bottom. It didn’t take long for our hardworking gardeners to fill barrow loads of the good stuff and top up the beds.
The strawberry patch should benefit, having new compost added. We divided runners and replanted strawberries. This year our students are experimenting, planting some of the strawberries in raised ridges topped with wool mulch and others just straight into the garden bed, to see which ones grew better and faster. The ridges are winning out so far, with bigger plants by far in comparison to the ones planted on the flat without mulch.
We brought in a Sodastream one day to make the most of our heavily fruiting lemon tree and enjoyed glasses of yummy lemonade, full of vitamin C to ward off the winter bugs! Another day we harvested a beautiful pink cauliflower, which was promptly devoured with a pot of hummus. The students at MMI are constantly harvesting from their gardens, taking home newspaper bundles to share herbs and veg with their families. Miss Barr also receives little parcels of veg for the school kitchen every now and again.
PiPS facilitators had a professional development day at Ngapeke Permaculture one Wednesday this term where we were gifted a Granadilla Passion Fruit to plant at Mount Intermediate Gardens. We are excited to see how it grows and to taste the unusual yellow fruit we have been promised.
We are looking forward to a bumper harvest from our ‘broad bean forest’ in the garden and the students are keen to make a broad bean dip to share. Our worm bins are cranking along nicely, providing us with some great organic fertiliser for our gardens which added to the compost, should mean continued productivity.
We have a project planned next term for our year 8 gardeners. In previous years we have found that our gardeners have struggled to stay motivated to work on planting what they won’t be here to harvest in Term 1, so we are looking to create take-home gardens. The gardeners have had some great ideas, and will hunt for some planter options over the holidays. We had lots of suggestions about gardens we could create from upcycled containers such as baskets, wooden drawers or even old fish bowls. Watch this space!
