Busy in June

What busy weeks these have been in our gardens. In between planting our crops of spinach, lettuce, cabbage, silverbeet, lettuce, broccoli, kale, beetroot and carrots we have learnt about the insects that are in our gardens.  

We went on a bug hunt to see what insects we could find around the school and we were disappointed not to find many.  We did find worms which was very exciting. We talked about what plants we could plant that could attract more of these insects into the gardens and we made a simple bug hotel with plant pots and what we could find around the school in the hope that this would help attract some more as well.

We talked about the ‘beneficial’ insects who help the gardens by eating the destructive insects. Many beneficial insects also pollinate the flowers of our crops, so there are many reasons to encourage them into our gardens. This is one reason we don’t use any pesticides in our school gardens – these chemicals may kill the insects we don’t want, but they’ll also destroy the beneficial ones too. To attract beneficial insects to our garden in spring we planted a blend of seeds called ‘Beneficial Insect Blend’. 

We also talked about the undesirable insects and how to prevent them coming into our garden, and if they do invade, how we control them without using pesticides. 

Because the soil that’s growing our vegetables is a living thing, we talked about how we could feed it so in turn it will feed our growing vegetables. We watched Whaea Laura’s video about soil conditioning and how we can feed the soil with thing lying around our houses. We learnt that banana skins and egg shells are great food for the garden. We talked about gathering leaves and seaweed which also feed the garden and are great mulches as well.  

Whaea Clare had bought banana skins, egg shells, seaweed and leaves and we cut these up and put into the garden beds. We’re eager to see if they help our veges grow big and strong.

The last week of term coincided with the annual ‘New Zealand Garden Bird Survey’, so we discussed how we could participate in our own backyards. We also made bird feeders to feed the birds in our gardens at home. We used dripping, wild bird seeds and some raisins. The dripping smelt terrible but we knew it was good protein for the birds.

 We also handed out harvests of spinach, herbs and rhubarb to our school community.

AND were given a voucher from Paper 4 Trees for 52 plants for our school gardens, a result of the paper our school recycles. Watch this space to see what we will do with these.