Tahatai Coast Kai Growers Term 1, 2023

Wow!  With all that rain over the Summer break, our gardens were full of growth after the holidays.  We even had a froggy visitor in the long wet grass!  With so much growth we managed to fill our Kai Cart a couple of weeks in a row, to share produce with our school whānau at school pick up time.

In the school orchard we had an amazing harvest with lots of varieties of different apples for our tamariki to taste, as well as some plums and nectarines.  Even our new entrants have become expert apple tasters and assure me that they taste “way better than the ones in the supermarket!”  

Our year 5s took over the role of being our worm farmers this term.  Mr. Greg hunted out two more worm farms for us, and we are already harvesting lots of organic fertiliser for our garden beds.  Thanks to the buckets of food scraps we pick up from Roger at the produce department at Fresh Choice Papamoa, our worms are the best fed in town!

We have been working on the quality of the soil in our garden beds too, planting green manure, which we have now ‘harvested’ by digging it back into the soil, to add nitrogen to our hardworking beds.

Our kai growers at Tahatai are sowing seeds every week, ensuring that we have a constant supply of seedlings to plant in our garden beds, to replace the crops we harvest.  

Another exciting project we have taken on is the planting of a Sentinel Garden - a pilot project launched by Tauranga Moana Biosecurity Capital (TMBC).  

As part of this project, our Kai Growers become kaitiaki, scientific observers, seeking out invasive pests in the gardens, ready to raise the alarm with Biosecurity NZ should they detect any invaders.  We had a visit from Lisa at Kiwifruit Vine Health, who shared her passion for the project with our tamariki.