A Super Busy Day
We did so much in the garden today. Hopefully all these pictures will help tell the story of the investigations and learning we’re doing.
Firstly we started a pea cup experiment with Clare. She gave each of us a few dried peas, a damp paper towel, and a biodegradable plastic cup (which we will reuse for other activities during the year). We scrunched up the paper towel and put it into the cup. Then we put the peas down the side of the cups nestled into the damp paper towel. Some of us will be taking the cups home, some will take them to their classrooms, and some will keep them in the greenhouse. Clare’s instructions are to keep the paper damp and the cups in a light place. What will happen?!
Some of our gardeners found an old bread bin in the rubbish skip and decided to turn it into a mini greenhouse. They’ve put their pea cups in there, and it will be very interesting to see if anything different happens to their cups.
Next we split into groups for some other activities. A couple of super strong gardeners offered to dig up the agapanthus plant growing by our gardens. They were very dedicated and kept at this task for the whole session.
Another group was keen to plant some spring bulbs and wildflowers under the trees. The bulbs went in, but we decided to germinate the wildflowers in trays in the greenhouse, and will transplant them when they’re a bit bigger. The reason for this is that the kikuyu grass is so vigorous that it will probably overpower our little wildflower seedlings unless we get them growing independently first.
Others planted silverbeet and carrot seedlings. We learned that we need to be really careful with the tiny roots of the seedlings. It’s very easy to damage them when we are taking them out of the punnet. Once they’re out we need to carefully disentangle each plant’s roots from the other without breaking them. And then we have to make sure we have a perfectly sized hole ready – the roots need to go well into the soil and be not left scrunched up on the surface. We saw that the plants that hadn’t had their roots well buried wilted very quickly in the sun. The roots are where the plant gets most of its moisture and nutrients, especially when it’s very small. Planting seedlings is actually quite a delicate and tricky job, and is much easier when there are two of you.
Lisa brought along some comfrey. Why is comfrey such a good plant to have in the garden? We can’t eat it, so why would we bother to grow it? Well, take a look at its incredibly long root and that might give you an idea of the answer…
A tap root this long can reach a long way into the soil and pull up nutrients that are buried way too far down for most plants’ roots to access. It brings those nutrients up closer to the surface for other plants to use, so it’s a great thing to have growing beside our fruit trees and vege plants. This is why comfrey’s leaves are often used to make fertiliser tea (like we made here), as they are also full of this goodness. And if that’s not enough, bees love comfrey flowers. And if bees come around to pollinate the comfrey flowers, they will also be pollinating the other flowers growing near them – namely our vege plants and fruit trees!
Luckily comfrey is really easy to grow and spreads like a weed. We can dig up the roots and chop them into pieces and each piece will sprout into a new plant once it’s buried. Lisa’s going to get a clump going by the greenhouse first, then once it’s established we’ll break it up and plant it under our orchard trees.