Back on Track

Welcome back to a new year in the garden! We are stoked to see some familiar faces this term, these are some of our most dedicated gardeners from last year and it will be fantastic to have their experience and leadership to help our new gardeners who are joining us for the first time this term.

We started our first session with a tour of our gardens. Here at Papamoa Beach we’ve been in a drought for the last few weeks, so water is scarce and even more precious than ever. Some of our orchard trees have really suffered. We have rain forecast for this week though, so we hope it comes in time.

Moving on to our garden beds, anyone might be forgiven for thinking they look somewhat neglected and unkempt…well, ok, they are a little unkempt due to us all having been on summer holidays, but there is also method to our madness. Look at the seeded lettuce head in the photo: instead of harvesting it (we just took some leaves from it every so often, but left the actual plant to grow) we’ve allowed it to produce flowers, which have fed the bees with nectar and pollen; in return they’ve pollinated the flowers, the flowers have produced seeds, and we can now collect the seeds to grow new plants. On this one branch of lettuce we have hundreds and hundreds of seeds – which means potentially hundreds and hundreds of new lettuces, all for free.

It’s not all dead and brown in our garden however. The jellybean tomatoes, which were planted in one of the shadier planter boxes beside the fence, are still producing delicious little tomatoes which were quickly snapped up and shared around. And this pumpkin plant had, until a few days ago, a great big pumpkin growing on it (unfortunately somebody came in and smashed the pumpkin up – pity they didn’t take it home and make some delicious soup with it instead! – but maybe we can collect some of the seeds lying around for next summer).

Next week we will be back to work getting our soil nice and healthy for our winter crops.