Orchard, Kumara and Digging

Mr Greg and Lisa have been working so hard in the orchard for us, clearing away the grass that’s growing around the base of the trees and putting in boxing around them. For the last couple of weeks Lisa and her garden team have been adding companion plants into the new box gardens. These plants will help keep the grass away and will attract bees and other beneficial insects to our fruit trees, as well as repelling pest insects. And they will look really nice!

Some of the companion plants they’re putting in are: calendula, borage, alyssum, pineapple sage and nasturtium.

Some of our other gardeners transplanted our wildflower seedlings into bigger pots, and another group were really just keen to dig. They did a great job moving a whole pile of mulch from over the other side of the school and filling one of our new planter boxes up. Great work guys.

Did we say ‘new planter boxes’? Why yes we did! We have a whole lot of kiwifruit bins that we are gradually filling with layers of mulch, straw and soil so we can grow a whole lot more stuff. 

After Garden Club had finished Lisa went to check the kumara patch. Looks like Mr Greg missed quite a few kumara when he dug up our harvest at the end of summer (try harder next time Mr Greg!) so we had a second harvest, including some real whoppers. We want to grow more kumara in this spot next summer, so Lisa is going to clear this garden and we’ll plant a green crop on here over winter. The green crop will be dug into the soil once it’s grown, and will provide the soil with lots more nutrients to feed our next kumara crop. In the meantime we’ll try and keep the kumara slips (seedlings) alive over winter. We’re planning to plant them in one of our new kiwifruit bin gardens.– this will be a bit of an experiment as we’re not quite sure what to do or how they’ll survive.