Finishing off the Year

Wow! As the weather has gotten warmer, our vegetables have flourished! We have been harvesting a great amount of food to share with our community, including delicious pak choi, radishes, beans and cornflowers. The kids love to harvest - the best part of gardening as all of your hard work has paid off! We were very lucky this term as we had Tess join us to share all her wonderful organic gardening knowledge. Tess will be taking over as the garden facilitator next year while Laura is on maternity leave.

We have been growing Kumara tipu (shoots) and it was time to harvest and plant them out! Did you know that you plant Kumara shoots from East to West? Also, planting them like a J and making sure you have a hard pan (hard ground) underneath will help you to get the biggest kumara. 

We love this time of year as lots of monarch butterflies come out. Clever Mr Webster has built a butterfly enclosure to help protect the caterpillars from wasps. The children love watching the caterpillars emerge from the chrysalis and even get the chance to hold them to gently set them free.

We have also been hard at work building another garden bed. We lined it with an old billboard and then filled it up with compost and mulch.

The seniors went on camp for the week which meant that the juniors got to join Tess and Laura for gardening! Tess taught us all about the parts of a seed and what they need to flourish. Together, we made seed bombs, tea with herbs and flowers from the garden, explored the garden space and learnt how to harvest without hurting the plants and also explored nature through our senses! We loved smelling the pineapple sage and some kids even turned it into perfume! We really enjoyed getting mucky by making seed bombs. All you need is clay, compost, water and seeds and get mixing! Once the seed bombs dry out you can plant them in your garden or anywhere with soil and voilà, a sunflower will grow! 

The seniors finished up the year with a bang. We did a final tidy up in the garden, pulling weeds and sweeping, and harvested everything that was ready. Some of our garlic was ready so we harvested that and set up a chain to prepare to make some delicious garlic bread! We also had some gigantic turnips that were definitely ready and zucchinis so we decided to make some turnip chips with herbs from the garden. 

Thank you so very much St Thomas More kids, I have absolutely loved working with each one of you and can’t wait to see all the amazing things you are going to do in the gardening world in the future!