Early Autumn Planting and Prep

There were jobs to do around the gardens today so we were very lucky the rain held off.

One group went with Clare and planted seedlings in the garden bed we cleared a couple of weeks ago. We planted winter greens – silverbeet and spinach. We made sure to cover around the seedlings with pea straw and water them in well.

We also checked on our watermelon that’s growing over in the strawberry bed. We wondered how to tell when it was ripe, we did some research and discovered two ways:

1. Look at its belly: Watermelons have an underside, or belly, which is in contact with the ground throughout its growth, called a ‘field spot’. This spot on a ripe watermelon will be yellowish (sometimes referred to as ‘buttery’), and not white, which indicates an unripe melon.

2. Thump it: Rap on the middle of the watermelon while holding it up to your ear . A ripe watermelon will have a hollow sound when knocked, which sounds more like a ‘plunk’ than a ‘thwack’. An unripe watermelon will have more of a higher pitched sound.

We don’t think our watermelon is ripe yet but we will keep checking. In the meantime we watered it.

Meanwhile another group of gardeners had a different kind of job to do. During the week Lisa had very kindly dug out a strip of the greenhouse floor for us to turn into a winter greenhouse garden. The only problem was that the soil was very sandy, and in that state it wouldn’t provide much food for the roots of our plants. We knew we needed to enrich the soil, but what could we use?

Well… fortunately we made some compost last year. We made it out of trimmings and weedings and leaves from the garden, and from food waste like banana skins and apple cores from our lunchboxes. We thought surely that old rubbish couldn’t be much use to us, but when we checked the compost bin all we found was beautiful rich, dark soil (and quite a few bugs and worms). How fantastic that our waste could have turned into something so useful! We couldn’t even work out how much it would have cost the school to have bought in all that compost. It was another of those gardening win-win situations we love to discover.

So our gardeners did a great job of ferrying barrowfuls of compost over to the greenhouse and then carefully transferring it into the garden bed – superb co-operation and communication – while another group went around the school to collect dead leaves to add to the mix. By the end of the session the garden bed was looking a whole lot better, and ready for planting next week.