Spring Weather and Kale Chips

September is here and with it comes the changeable spring weather. Some days it’s been lovely and warm and others cold and wet. We’ve been taking the soil temperature with Whaea Clare’s soil thermometer each week which has been lots of fun.

There’s still plenty to harvest in our winter gardens though. We’ve been sharing and taking home broccoli, spinach, silverbeet, kale and lettuce. And the pea plants are still popping out tasty pods, for those quick enough to get them!

We had fun crushing eggshells with a mortar and pestle and sprinkling them around the plants in our garden beds. Eggshells feed the soil and apparently help protect the plants from slugs and snails, because they don’t like crawling over the broken pieces of shell.

We had so much kale in the garden that Miss Hunt took groups of students over to the kitchen to make kale chips. They must have been good because hardly any of them made it back to the gardens for the rest of us to try! The recipe is:

Once our Kai Growers had learned how to cook kale chips they were able to mentor groups of Year 2 students too cook some too. In this way our Kai Growers become leaders, and pass on the knowledge they have gained to other members of the school.

We also had to spring into action as kaitiaki of our school orchard. There had been reports that some of our orchard trees had been damaged. Maybe other kids didn’t know the story of our trees or how to best look after them. So after feeding our trees with some horse manure (really, it’s just old chewed up grass so not as gross as you might think!) and weeding the grass from around them, our Kai Growers ‘adopted’ a tree. They will keep an eye on their tree and gently educate any kids they see who might be damaging it. Once again this is a great way for our gardeners to pass on the knowledge they are gaining to their peers, turning something that could have been negative into a positive :)