Working on our Summer Garden

We got some fantastic news from Mrs Robertson today. She told us we had raised $260 at our seedling sale in the weekend! A huge thank you to Mrs Robertson for organising and managing our stall, and to James and Benny for helping run it. We‘ll put up another blog post all about the seedling sale soon.

Meanwhile it was back to the gardens for us. We all worked together to plant some corn seedlings. We learned that we should plant the corn in blocks, rather than long rows, because corn is wind pollinated. If the plants are in a clump there is much more chance of the pollen from one plant being blown to another plant than if they are in a long line.

Look at the long roots on some of these corn seedlings! Strong roots like this will give our plants a really good start in life.

We chopped down our lupin plants that were growing in another bed. Even though the lupins had pods growing on them that looked very much like beans, we learned that these weren’t for eating. In fact none of the plant was – not the leaves or the roots either. The reason we grew the lupins had nothing to do with what we could get from them, but what they would do for our soil. They are a really good way of returning nitrogen to the soil, which in turn will help the next crop of veges we grow in that bed to be strong and leafy. We did save some of the pods though, so we’d be able to grow more lupin plants next year.

And once again we did a great job of harvesting and eating from our gardens. More delicious sprouting broccoli, more cauliflower and lettuce. There was enough left over for James to take back to share with his class. And with all the wildflowers blooming in the gardens, we got a bit distracted picking bunches to take to our teachers and parents…that’s not a bad thing to be distracted by though, is it?!