Welcome Back
Tahatai Kai Growers is back on board, bigger and better than ever. This year we have officially become a lunchtime elective option, and we had lots of keen gardeners lining up to join. We’re looking forward to an exciting year.
We started the term by doing a tour of our garden, to see what was going on. We went to check out the orchard and noticed that some of our trees had new branches sprouting out of the ground by the main trunk. The branches looked really strong and healthy - surely that was a good sign for our trees? It turns out not to be the case! To find the reason we had to take a step back and learn about rootstock.
What on earth is ‘rootstock’ you may ask? Luckily we had Lisa to explain to us. Imagine you have a tree with really strong, pest resistant roots but maybe not-so-tasty fruit. Meanwhile there is also a tree with really delicious fruit, but its roots are weak and susceptible to disease. How could you get the best of both worlds - a strong, healthy tree with delicious, succulent fruit? It turns out the answer is to use the roots of the strong tree, cut it off at the bottom of the trunk, and join the trunk of the fantastic fruiting tree onto it. It sounds crazy but it’s what is done to almost all our fruit trees, and it’s called ‘grafting onto rootstock’.
This all works great but what tends to happen is that the rootstock - because it’s so strong and healthy - likes to try and put out its own branches (called suckers) at the base of the tree. We don’t want the tree to put all its energy into growing these suckers because the fruit they produce won’t be tasty (we’d rather it concentrated on growing delicious fruit onto the grafted branches) so we need to prune the suckers off. Lisa showed us how. Now we know what to look for we can report to Clare and Lisa if we see suckers sprouting from any of our orchard plants.
We also noticed how the kikuyu grass is creeping in and taking nutrients from the soil that we want our trees to have. Kikuyu grass is very tough, it puts runners down very deeply and can regrow from just a broken little piece of root. We’re going to think this week about what we could do to try and control it.
We checked on the worm farms too. One was going well but the other was in a bit of a sorry state. What happened? Did it dry out? Did the worms starve? We’re doing our best to follow Leo’s advice from last year and get it pumping again.
As we continued our garden tour Lisa decided to check the kumara. Look what she found! Clare’s done some research and harvest time is end of March - beginning of April. We need to wait until all the leaves die back…can we hold off for another month?! We want to dig those kumara up and roast them for lunch this very minute!
When we first planted out the kumara, we also put some sunflower and swan plant seedlings around them to help them stay healthy. Well, they have certainly done a good job of that if the state of our sample kumara is any indication. But they’ve provided more than that - the swan plants have been attracting monarch butterflies all summer, and the sunflowers have made the most magnificent, beautiful display for everyone who goes past the school. Who’d have thought those tiny little seedlings that the boys planted out a the end of last term would get so big they’d be more than double our height? Even better, as their flowers die back their seeds will provide a huge feast for our local manu. It’s a win-win-win situation. Special thanks to Jacob for the sunflowers :)
