The End of 2017
Today was our last garden club session for 2017. The year has flown by, and just as our gardens have flourished and grown over the last four terms, so has our club.
There was no messing around on our last day though. Leo from Why Waste came back to see us and this time we talked compost. In order to grow healthy plants, our garden soil is always needing to be fed and enriched, and compost is a great way of doing this. It seems crazy that we need to buy compost to put in our garden at school while at the same time we throw away buckets and buckets of food waste from our lunch boxes every day, food waste that could be turned into beautiful, rich compost. So Leo came along to talk to us about how that might be possible.
We learned that compost needs four ingredients:
- Nitrogen: the ‘green stuff’ - food waste, fresh green leaves and grass, and basically things that rot down. This is where our lunch box leftovers come in.
- Carbon: the ‘brown stuff’ such as dried leaves and sticks, shredded cardboard and newspaper.
– Water: enough to help things break down without making a big rotten mess.
- Oxygen: to help the organic matter decompose.
With the proper mixture of water, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen, micro-organisms are able to break down organic matter to produce compost.
In order to run a productive compost system, every bucket of food waste that goes into it needs around to 15 buckets of dry, brown carbon matter mixed in. So if each of the 30 classrooms in our school produced a bucket of food waste a day, we’d need… well, you can do the maths but it comes to a whole lot of buckets of carbon.
Our minds started to boggle! So we decided to start small, by building a tumbling composter, in order to get a handle on how the process works before we go any further. Leo had drawn us a plan:
…and brought along the big plastic drum. Mr Rieger gave us the posts, pole and tools and we got to work.
We didn’t quite get to finish though, because Clare had made a delicious lemon and coconut cake for an end of year celebration, and once she revealed that, all work came to a sudden halt. It must have smelled amazing because Mr Skilton and Mr Scott both turned up to have a slice. It was great to have them along to show them what we’ve been up to.
Clare and the volunteers are so proud of all our gardeners and what they’ve achieved this year. We have definitely been “learning, growing and gardening together”. It’s not just the growing that’s exciting to see, but the attitude of our gardeners. The respect everyone shows each other, the co-operation, support and good humour, the problem solving, creative thinking and ingenuity, all these things are what make it a pleasure to be part of the garden club. Tahatai Kai Growers, give yourselves a pat on the back. Have a great holiday and keep your home gardens growing!
“Ki te mea ka taka te kākano ki te wāhi e tika ana ka tinaku, ā, ka pihi ake he tipu hou.” If a seed falls in the right place it will germinate and a new seedling will sprout.
Thank you Clare and the volunteers for all your hard work this year.