“Worms Are Friendly Gardeners”

We were very lucky today to have Leo from Why Waste come to visit. What was he going to talk about, we wondered?

Leo started off by discussing the carbon cycle while we ate our lunch. He talked about the things plants need to grow, where their food comes from (yes, plants need to eat too), and how that food is produced; and how we need to look after the soil and put nutrients back into it once we’ve grown and harvested from it. Then Leo started talking about WORMS. Some of us were disgusted. Some of us were excited. Some of us were just puzzled as to what could be so interesting about these slimy little creatures!

We soon found out. It turns out that worms are some of the best gardeners nature has ever produced. They can turn old leaves and food scraps into amazing, natural fertiliser, and they do it all for free!

Leo took a look at our school worm farms. They were in a bit of a sorry state, there was not much food and not many worms. He helped us figure out what the problems might be and how we could fix them. We started off by feeding the worms a whole lot of brown stuff – straw, dry leaves, torn up paper and cardboard, which provide carbon. Then a few of our lunch leftovers went in - banana skins and apple cores - for some nitrogen foods. And finally we gave them a drink (not too much though). By this time our bins were looking very different to when we first opened them up.

Now that we’ve learned how and why to look after our worms, we will be keeping a very close eye on them. Hopefully they’ll be feeling much happier and will start reproducing. The more worms we have, the more waste they’ll turn into worm poos. That might sound pretty gross but in fact worm castings are just about the best thing we could put on our gardens to replenish the soil and help our plants grow.

Thank you so much Leo, for sharing your time and your expertise. We really hope you’ll come back again soon.

Some facts we learned about worms today:

– If we put our food scraps into the worm farm instead of throwing them into the rubbish bin, we can get free fertiliser for our gardens AND make less waste to go to the tip.

– There are some food worms don’t like. Citrus and citrus peel, because it’s too acidic for them, and worms do not like acidic conditions. Bread, because it goes mouldy, and just like us, worms don’t like eating mouldy food. 

– We found some pumpkin seeds that had sprouted and started to grow inside the worm farm. We wondered why the worms hadn’t eaten them, and Leo told us it was because worms don’t like eating live things, and seeds and sprouts are alive.

– It’s not just worms who eat the food scraps we put into the worm farm. Microbes, tiny microscopic creatures we can’t even see, help break down the scraps, and the worms eat the microbes as well as the scraps.

– Worms need food, water and oxygen, just like us. But unlike us they prefer to live in the dark.

– Worm poos are called ‘castings’.

– Worms are hermaphrodites - every worm is both male and female.

– The worms in a worm farm are called tiger worms.

– New Zealand has 171 species of native earthworms, and the longest grows up to 1.3 metres long!

- We now look at worms in a completely different light. We’ve learned that far from being scary and disgusting, they are actually friendly, hard working little gardeners, and we owe them a very big thank you.

Busy Bees

It was great to have everyone back on board this week and we got lots done. An amazing bamboo bean frame was constructed with the help of architect Lisa…

We also got the whole kumara patch dug over, mounded up, fertilised and ready for the kumara to go in. In the process we found a worm that had literally tied itself in a knot!

As well as all that we managed to plant a whole lot of beans and peas in pots and lots of other summer seedlings into the garden beds. Doing that meant we had to clear space – because we never have enough space – which meant there was produce for our gardeners to take home.

It was so impressive how well everyone worked together today, and really stuck to the tasks they were doing. We have such a great group of dedicated gardeners, it is a real pleasure to be out in the garden with them.

Welcome to Term 4

We were lucky to have a sunny, wind-free day for our first session of the new term. We had lots to do including:

— clearing some of the garden beds to make room for summer crops

— planting some of the tomato plants we raised from seed

— replacing one of the fruit trees in the orchard, which had unfortunately had its trunk snapped. We planted a ‘Winter Banana’ apple tree in its place. The apples are supposed to have a slight banana-like flavour, we can’t wait to find out if this is true!

— planting potatoes in tyres

— planting sunflower seeds

— fertilising and watering all our baby tomato plants. We are planning to run a stall in a couple of weeks to share them with our school community.

Because all the year 5 & 6s were at school camp, there were only a few of us but we got to work and got everything done. 

Last Day of Term

It was the last meet up of Term 3 so our gardeners were allowed to choose three types of seed to sow into pots and take home. There was a lot of excitement and discussion as the choices were made, the seeds were planted and the pots were labelled, and it brought home to us how much we’ve all learned over the year – things we are taking for granted now about what seeds need to grow and how we need to look after them were all new to many of us at the start of the year.

The remaining veggies in the garden are mostly going to seed now, and we’re going to let them flower over the holidays to give the bees some food. While the bees collect nectar to eat they will also pollinate the flowers. And pollination will make the flowers set seed, meaning we can collect free seed to grow new plants next term… so everybody wins :)

In the greenhouse the sunflower seeds we planted last week are already germinating, and we were amazed to see how powerful a little seed can be and how much dirt it can lift up! Our tomato plants are getting really big – we are each going to take one home and plant it in our own gardens. We’re going to have to repot the rest of them again after the holidays if they keep growing so well.

Happy holidays everyone and thank you to all our volunteers and teachers who have helped with the garden club this term :)

Leaf Cutter Bees

We were very lucky today to have Allan from Mt Maunganui New World come and deliver an amazing leaf cutter bee hive and a little bottle of leaf cutter bee cocoons to put inside it.

Leaf cutter bees are a solitary bee species, meaning they don’t live co-operatively in a hive, instead they each go about their business independently. They don’t make honey, so they don’t have anything to protect, which means they are very unlikely to sting. AND they are far more efficient pollinators than honey bees – apparently one leaf cutter bee can do the pollination work of 30 honey bees! All this is great news for our gardens (and our neighbour’s gardens).

Leaf cutter bees also have a fascinating way of reproducing. The female bees cut circles out of leaves or flowers and carry them back to their nest. Then they roll the leaf circle up into a tube, put some pollen inside, lay an egg beside it, then seal up the ends with more little circles of leaves. When the egg hatches the larvae will feed on the pollen. When the larva is big enough it will pupate (transform from a grub into a bee), and the new bee will eat its way out of the leaf cocoon and emerge into the world to pollinate more flowers and make more bees.

Clare has set the hive up in a sunny spot beside the greenhouse. We really hope our leaf cutters hatch safely in summer and we get the chance to observe these amazing little guys going about their work.

Here is more information about leaf cutter bees in New Zealand, and a cool video of a leaf cutter bee in action. And this website has more info and a clip at the bottom of the page of a bee making a cocoon. 

Thank you very much Mt Maunganui New World, for such a generous and environmentally positive gift to our school!

A row of leaf cutter bee cocoons made of rolled up leaves. We put these into the holes in the hive, and they will stay in there to pupate and hopefully emerge in summer.

Visit to The Rock Community Garden

Today we went on an outing to The Rock Community Garden. Lisa met us there and showed us around – there was so much to see, and we got lots of ideas for our own garden at school. Thank you Mr Scott for joining us.

Back at school everything is starting to wake up. Our tomato seedlings are going great guns in the greenhouse, and our hebe cuttings are also growing well outside.

We have let one of our broccoli heads flower so we can collect the seeds (and feed the bees). 

And there are blossoms in the orchard! Here’s Mr Reiger checking out one of the nectarine trees.

Soup Day!

At last the long awaited soup-making day arrived. Every week our gardeners have been asking if it was time to make the soup, they were so keen not only to taste the fruits of their labours but also to share them with their teachers and friends.

We started by having a look around the garden to see what was ready to harvest. 

The answer was – lots. Broccoli, kale, silverbeet, cauliflower, celery, beetroot leaves… we filled several bowls and still had more left over. And a bonus is that most of these plants will keep growing more leaves and sprouts for us to harvest again in a couple of weeks.

The first thing was to wash all our produce, then cut or break it into small pieces ready for cooking. Clare had bought along an onion but the novelty of cutting that up soon wore off. Then everything went into the pot, along with the vege stock Clare had made and the frozen tomato pulp Alan donated from his last year’s tomato crop.

Phew, it was a tight squeeze in the kitchen and pretty intense work. But an hour and a half later the soup was ready and not only did we get to enjoy it, but our teachers did too. We took a tray of soup cups into the staff room and they were snapped up in moments (Mr Jay even took two cups). It was a real moment of pride for our gardeners.

The Sun Comes Out

At last we have some warm, sunny weather that really makes us feel that spring is on its way. Technically it’s still winter but because we have our greenhouse we have been able to get some tomatoes sprouting already. They’ve done so well that it took Lisa and one of our dedicated gardeners the entire session to transplant the seedlings into individual pots. Don’t they look great sitting in the greenhouse on the shelves Mr Reiger made us from a pallet and an old school bench!

We really need them to grow as Mr Reiger is expecting a good supply of tomatoes for his sandwiches throughout the summer as payment ;)

We found several passionfruit vines growing around the school, they must have sprouted from someone’s school lunch passionfruit last summer! We rescued them and Alan helped us build a trellis for them to climb up against the bin shed. We’ve planted two of them here and are keeping one other in a pot in the greenhouse as insurance.

Today it was time to say goodbye to our pea plants. It was a tiny bit sad as we grew those plants from seeds, and they have supplied us with delicious peas, pods and sprouts for weeks. But even though they are finished, they’re still going to keep working for us. The roots of the pea plants contain some special nodes that help fix nitrogen into the soil – nitrogen is really important for plants to grow strong, healthy leaves – so digging these back into the earth will be great for the next crop we grow in there. And the chopped up stems and leaves make a great mulch – mulch stops weeds from growing and keeps the moisture in the soil from evaporating in the sun. So in these ways the peas continue to help us out.

Luckily Matt came to help us today so with his assistance we had the pea plants all chopped up and a new crop of lettuces planted out.

We Have An Orchard!

The rain last week caused a delay in our orchard planting, but we got it sorted this week. Thanks to Mr Reiger, Clare, Brooke, Alan, Lisa and all the teachers, almost every student was involved in the planting. 

Now we all know how special the trees are, let’s take care of them, respect them, and see what happens in spring.

Tui whanau all getting involved.

Exciting Happenings!

Something very exciting is going on at the school right now, and our Kai Growers are right in the middle of it all. Here’s a hint:

And here are some more hints:

(Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, that really is Mr Scott with the spade and Mr Skilton on one end of the post hole borer. They did a great job of mucking in, we even saw sweat pouring from their brows!)

Thanks to a morning’s hard work by all these people, 20 holes have been dug and back filled with a delicious mixture of soil, water and aged horse manure. Big thank yous to Clare, Mr Reiger, Lisa A, Brooke, Matt, Scott, Lisa R, Mr Scott and Mr Skilton – it couldn’t have happened without you all.

It was great to see both our principals lending a hand, it is fantastic to have their support but more importantly they are setting an example to all our students about valuing and respecting our school environment. 

Next week will be a very exciting time when the whole school will be involved in planting the trees and helping to create our very own Tahatai Coast School Orchard!

Term 3 Begins

After two weeks break it was good to be back in the garden. There was lots of enthusiasm and excitement which made it a bit hard to focus but we will soon settle back into things. 

Our pea vines are still producing and it was interesting to see how often everyone kept drifting back to the pea garden to do a bit of foraging during the session. Lots of greens were consumed today that’s for sure.

The winter veggies we planted 10 weeks ago are coming along really well, and the broccoli are forming heads. 

And the bulbs and wildflowers are getting there too…

Clare checked on the hebe cuttings we had taken a few weeks ago. They looked the same on the surface but when we took them out of the potting mix there was a big difference – they’d gone from being stumpy little twigs to fully formed plants with their own strong root systems. So they can continue to grow each cutting needed to be transferred into its own pot. This took a bit of time as we’d been so successful with our cuttings that we had over 20 plants to repot. And to think these all came completely for free!

Finally, we had some work to do on Savage Paradise, our insect hotel. Mr Reiger needed some of his bricks back, so we needed to do a bit of disassembly and redesigning on the spot. This required us to employ not only brute strength and co-operation but some maths skills as well as we figured out how to replace the missing bricks with other objects that would retain the balance and height of each layer.

The most exciting, and for some traumatic, part was all the spiders we discovered along the way. We are gradually learning that these little guys are nothing to be afraid of and are in fact doing our garden ecosystem a lot of good.

Our End-of-Term Party

We had a little feast today to celebrate the end of term and because we “accomplished our achievements”. 

First we made chips from our very own kale, which we harvested then baked in the oven…

Harvesting, preparing and eating our kale chips.

The kale chips were very popular. We soon had lots of other students wanting to join in our party.

Last week Clare had asked our gardeners what else they’d like to eat for our feast. The requests were impressively healthy – popcorn, carrots and cucumber. So we had these to eat along with hummus, chocolate brownies, a honey and lemon cake and more of Lisa’s delicious mandarins.

While the others were cooking the kale chips one of our gardeners was busy harvesting peas and exploring. She noticed there were more peas  growing on the sunny side of the planter box than on the shady side, and that the pea pods were very well camouflaged and hard to find, both for us and probably for hungry birds too. She discovered little green caterpillars hiding in the leaves. And most interestingly of all, she found some pea flowers that were just starting to become pea pods, so we got the chance to observe exactly how they were being formed.

It’s very exciting to see this kind of spontaneous curiosity and exploration happening as our gardeners become more familiar and confident around the plants. Clare and the volunteers are really noticing this change. There is so much learning going on!

Thank you Clare, for all the work you’ve put in to making this such a fun and interesting term. 

Thank You Moviegoers!

A big THANK YOU to everyone who came and supported us at our movie fundraising night on Thursday. We hope you enjoyed yourself and the movie provided some food for thought.

As well as fundraising, the screening was a chance for us to thank many of our supporters, contributors and sponsors. We’ve had such support from people like Clare, our garden facilitator, our garden club volunteers, and the principals, teachers and BoTs of our member schools. We’ve learnt from, and shared knowledge with, contributors like Crafty Gatherer, Why Waste, Seaside Bees and Free As A Bird (check out their websites because there are some amazing things going on in our community). And of course sponsors like Tui, and Tauranga City Council, who have been a huge help to our cause. 

Special thanks to Jenna at Tui for donating most of the products for our gift basket spot prize, which had such lovely goodies in it that it was a wrench for us to give it away :)

Thank you again to all of you!

Bee-utiful Bees

We were very fortunate today to have Sylvana and Chris from Seaside Bees come to talk to us about bees and all the amazing things they do. We also got to see inside a hive, look at some real honeycomb and learn about beekeeping equipment. We were proud to realise that we already knew quite a lot about bees.

Sylvana and Chris even left us some honeycomb wax and we have some exciting projects lined up to use this next term. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your knowledge with us Chris and Sylvana :)

Trying out a bee suit.

Learning about what goes on inside the hive.

Checking out the honeycomb.

A candle made from honeycomb, and Sylvana showing us the smoker, which helps calms the bees down when she’s working in the hive.

Beeswax saved into ingots, and little hand made beeswax candles.

We had a good reason to thank the bees today, too, when we picked a harvest of pods from our pea plants. Without the bees the pea flowers could never have transformed into pods, and we wouldn’t have enjoyed this delicious snack. Thank you bees!

Who knew there would be so much competition to eat your greens? Somehow they taste so much better when you’ve grown them yourself.

A final little surprise today when we went to water the wildflower seeds we planted a couple of weeks ago (without even being reminded to… we are learning fast). They’ve sprouted! At this rate we should have a beautiful display of flowers in spring which will be great not only for us, but for the bees as well.

‘Savage Paradise’

Today many of our gardeners were raring to get back to work on the bug hotel – or ‘Savage Paradise’, as it’s been named. But first we needed to eat lunch (we were glad to have our cosy greenhouse to shelter in on this cold, windy day), and do a few garden jobs. We picked up the litter the wind had blown into our garden, earthed up the potatoes and sprinkled coffee grounds around our vege plants.

Then under the experienced eye of Alan, the sawing and construction began, resulting in some VERY happy gardeners. It was great to see the co-operation and learning going on amidst the excitement.

Meanwhile Lisa helped us plant some bee-friendly flower seeds in tyres near the bulbs we planted last week.

And she bought along a mystery plant that had self-seeded in her compost bin. There were quite a few guesses before we figured out what it was.

Earthing up the potatoes and planting flower seeds.

Cooperating and learning new skills.

‘Savage Paradise’ and Lisa’s mystery seedling.

Homes for Everyone

Although the weather has been amazing lately, winter is now officially here and this week seemed a good time to think about ways of keeping things warm in our garden environment. So…we got busy and built two different homes. Our student gardeners started construction on a bug hotel behind Mr Rieger’s shed, and at the same time some of the adult volunteers put our new greenhouse up. Now we have a critter palace full of all sorts of nooks and crannies for the bugs, and a warm, dry place to grow and nurture our plants.

Thank you to everyone who pitched in to help, and to Tauranga City Council’s Community Development Match Fund, whose grant allowed us to purchase the greenhouse. It’s going to make a huge difference to our garden and will allow so many more learning opportunities for our young gardeners.

Busy in Our Autumn Garden

We had lots of jobs to do on this nice, fine day, so we split up into groups. A couple of us potted up the wet seeds we’d been fermenting from last week. Lemons, capsicums and apples…will they grow?

We also planted up our herb garden, and Lisa bought along two choko plants that had started to sprout, so we popped them into the ground as well. Are you wondering what a choko is? Click here to find out!

Then we all worked together to plant some spring flower bulbs that have been kindly donated to us by Garden Post. We put them under the trees at the front of the school. They may not look like much now, but just wait a couple of months! The most exciting part of this job was finding worms, there were some massive ones, which is a good sign for the health of the soil.

Different Ways of Growing Plants

Today at Garden Club Clare had us thinking about the different ways we can make new plants. Planting seeds is an obvious one, and based on what we learned from Tess a few weeks ago we saved some ‘wet’ seeds of lemon, apple and capsicum, by taking the seeds from the fruit and putting them in jars of water to soak for a few days. We will check on these next week.

Another way of making new plants is by taking cuttings. Clare showed us how to take cuttings from a hebe which is going to be removed to make way for our school’s new front garden. We put the cuttings, which were just little branchlets we cut off from the main plant, into potting mix and watered them. We’ll keep them in a warm, sheltered place over winter (hopefully our new greenhouse) and with luck some of them will start to take root. By growing new plants from cuttings we’ll be able to replace the original hebe plus make a few more plants for free! Hebes are a great food source for our birds, bees and insects especially over winter when there aren’t many other flowers around, so they are a plant we really want to encourage in our school environment.

We also got our nectar feeders up into the trees, supervised by our local tui. Mr Rieger put one up right by our garden beds and the others went into the nearby trees. It will be interesting to see whether the tui start using them over the next few days – they were definitely very curious about them.

Not sure that’s an approved ladder there, Mr Rieger.

Tui Feeders

Once again it was raining, but once again that didn’t stop us. Today we had a visit from Jenna from Tui, who came to see our gardens full of the compost and garden mix they donated. Of course they were looking fantastic! Jenna had also given us some feeders for nectar-eating birds, so we had fun in Greg’s shed figuring out how they worked and filling them up. Because of the rain we couldn’t hang them in the trees, but Greg said he’d help us do it next week. Jenna suggested we keep a watch on which feeders are the most popular with our local tui, and whether having them here manages to attract even more birds to our school.

Our ingredients: sugar and water.

A filled feeder ready to be hung up.

Seed Saving

Today Tess from Crafty Gatherer came to talk to us about seed saving – why and how we do it. We learned that 75% of the world’s seed varieties have been lost, so it's really important to preserve what we have left, to keep lots of variety and vigour in our plants. Tess showed us several ways of gathering seeds – one was soaking ‘wet’ seeds (those that come from inside fruits and veggies like pumpkins and tomatoes, where they are damp inside the fruit) and letting them ferment in water for a few days before drying them. With seeds that have dried on the plant, like flower seeds, broccoli and beans, we need to release the seeds out of their pods. One way to do this is by rubbing the pods in between our fingers, another is stamping on the dried out plants (a good way to keep fit at the same time). We then took what we’d crushed and shook it in a special layered sieve so the smaller seeds fell through the grid leaving the chaff behind. It was a really fun and engaging talk and we’re looking forward to putting lots of these techniques into practice over the coming weeks.

Thank you so much for your time, Tess!

Soaking ‘wet’ seeds.

Stomping ‘dry’ seeds.

Sieving the seeds from the chaff.