Orchard, Kumara and Digging

Mr Greg and Lisa have been working so hard in the orchard for us, clearing away the grass that’s growing around the base of the trees and putting in boxing around them. For the last couple of weeks Lisa and her garden team have been adding companion plants into the new box gardens. These plants will help keep the grass away and will attract bees and other beneficial insects to our fruit trees, as well as repelling pest insects. And they will look really nice!

Some of the companion plants they’re putting in are: calendula, borage, alyssum, pineapple sage and nasturtium.

Some of our other gardeners transplanted our wildflower seedlings into bigger pots, and another group were really just keen to dig. They did a great job moving a whole pile of mulch from over the other side of the school and filling one of our new planter boxes up. Great work guys.

Did we say ‘new planter boxes’? Why yes we did! We have a whole lot of kiwifruit bins that we are gradually filling with layers of mulch, straw and soil so we can grow a whole lot more stuff. 

After Garden Club had finished Lisa went to check the kumara patch. Looks like Mr Greg missed quite a few kumara when he dug up our harvest at the end of summer (try harder next time Mr Greg!) so we had a second harvest, including some real whoppers. We want to grow more kumara in this spot next summer, so Lisa is going to clear this garden and we’ll plant a green crop on here over winter. The green crop will be dug into the soil once it’s grown, and will provide the soil with lots more nutrients to feed our next kumara crop. In the meantime we’ll try and keep the kumara slips (seedlings) alive over winter. We’re planning to plant them in one of our new kiwifruit bin gardens.– this will be a bit of an experiment as we’re not quite sure what to do or how they’ll survive.

Thank You Tui!

Once again Tui Garden have been very generous supporters of PiPS and have donated more potting mix and seed raising mix to help our budding gardeners with their projects. The seed raising mix will be extra helpful this week as we plan to sow more seeds our next pop-up stall. Thank you Tui!

Watermelons!

Today at last we harvested our watermelons. It’s been a bit of an unusual summer and not the best one for growing melons, but we still had two to try. One had been growing in a really sunny spot, and one was in the shade. When we cut them open they looked - and tasted – quite different. Can you guess which one grew where? 

One watermelon was sweeter than the other.

We were in two groups today, one group planted more vege seeds into punnets for our next pop up stall at the end of term, and the other continued to clear the grass from around the orchard trees and plant companion plants around them.

We harvested some of our spinach and silverbeet to take home. Ali has never seen kids so eager for their share of spinach! 

We found a garden friend while we were harvesting silverbeet.

First Pop-Up Stall of the Year

Over the last two mornings a group of our gardeners have come to school extra early to sell their winter vege seedlings in a pop-up stall outside the main entrance.

These guys have been really dedicated over the last eight weeks in taking care of these plants, which they have grown and nurtured from seed. So it was awesome to see their pride and enthusiasm at the culmination of all their effort. They raised $63.50 for our garden club!

We’ve taken careful note of which plants were the most popular sellers and other comments our customers made about what they would like to buy, and we’ll take this into account when we sow our next batch of seeds. Another thing we learned for next time is to make sure we label our seeds accurately when we sow them. We had trouble identifying some of our plants, which made it a bit difficult to sell them to our customers.

Thank you to all the parents, students and staff who supported the stall this week.

Even Mr Scott wasn’t immune to the great sales skills of our gardeners.

Orchard Pruning

The lovely Neta works at Palmers Welcome Bay and is a volunteer at Arataki School’s garden club. As if she doesn’t have enough to do already, she came to our school today to show Clare, Lisa, Mr Greg and Ali how to prune our fruit trees. She gave us lots of advice, not just about pruning but other orchard-care tips too. We and our trees thank you, Neta!

Lots of Jobs to Do

Back to the garden after two weeks’ holiday and there was lots to do.

Clare had a group in the garden beds, weeding, learning and doing a bit of tasting too – our winter greens are growing really well.

Meanwhile Lisa’s group went into the orchard to do some companion planting around the orchard trees and tidy things up. We are looking at ways of keeping the grass from growing too closely around our trees. Kikuyu grass is very invasive and its roots can grow a long way down, taking nutrition from the soil that we’d rather was going into our fruit trees.

Ali’s group were busy preparing for their pop-up vege stall next Tuesday before school. These guys have grown these winter vege plants from seed and are excited at the thought of sharing them with our school community next week. They had to decide on prices for all their goods, draw up a price list, make plant tags and create signage. Next will be the big challenge – they need to remember to come to school early next Tuesday.

After garden club finished Clare, Lisa, Greg and Ali had a meeting to decide where to put our ten new kiwifruit bins. We are going to have so much more growing space very soon!

Transplanting Seedlings

It was really cold and wet today so Clare cancelled garden club, but a few determined souls still turned up, keen as mustard. Two went off to help Mr Greg with some digging, and the other boys helped Ali pot up some vege seedlings. These have grown from the seeds that we planted just four weeks ago and they’re looking very healthy. Keeping them in the greenhouse and watering them gently every couple of days has really done the trick.

Transplanting the seedlings was a delicate job. Firstly they needed to be very carefully removed from the grow cells – the boys used ice block sticks to lever them out while causing the least possible damage to the delicate roots. In some cases it was very difficult because the roots had grown through the bottoms of the cells – a sign that it was definitely time for them to be moved to more spacious accommodation.

Because they’re planning to sell the plants, the boys decided to make bigger pots containing three seedlings in each. They chose to make various combinations of the different veges – kale, broccoli, Brussel sprouts, cabbage and lettuce. They filled the big pots with potting mix, made sure it was nice and damp, then poked deep holes into the mix to pop the seedlings’ roots into. Then they gently firmed the mix around the stem of each plant to make sure it was secure.

Now it’s a matter of nuturing them for another two or three weeks until they’re big enough to sell. Because it’s the school holidays next week, one of our dedicated gardeners has offered to come in every couple of days to keep the seedlings well watered. Our gardeners have already calculated the amount they think they could earn for the garden club – very impressive maths skills on display :)

Monarch Surprises and the Bottle Drip Watering System

Today some of us were watering the new kumara plants (call us crazy but we have planted another crop of kumara, who knows how they’ll go over winter?) when we found some cool surprises on the swan plants…

When these guys hatch into butterflies they will be the generation who will live through the winter and lay their eggs in the spring, so they will be a very important link in the monarch butterfly chain.

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Meanwhile another group was setting up an experiment in one of the garden beds to try and help solve an issue we are constantly battling with – watering. Here in Papamoa we have long, hot summers and water conservation is something we really have to think about. And, being a school garden, we also have days when nobody is around to water the gardens and they dry out.

We also know that when we water the garden with the hose it takes a lot of water for it to soak deep enough into the soil to reach the roots of our plants – and if the water doesn’t get to the roots, the plant can’t make use of it. 

So the questions are, how can we get the water down to the roots of our plants without wasting a whole lot of it? And how can we provide water to our plants when we’re not there? Clare saw a video about bottle drip irrigation that might be able to help, so we decided to see if it would make a difference in our garden beds. We’re starting out with a couple of bottles in one garden bed. If it works we will make more. Here’s what we did:

Step 1. We drilled some small holes in the bottom half of two large plastic bottles. 

Step 2. We dug holes almost as deep as the bottle, beside the plants we wanted to water.

Step 3. We put the bottles in the holes and fill in the dirt around it. We left the tops of the bottles sticking out of the soil.

Step 4. We filled the bottles with water and put the lid on.

What do you think will happen? How will it help our plants? Stay tuned to find out.

We also transplanted some of our pea cup plants into pots, harvested more seeds from our basil plant and planted them into punnets, checked on our trays of wildflower seeds (they’ve germinated!), watered the transplanted tomato plants in the greenhouse (they are looking great!), continued digging out the agapanthus, watered our rapidly growing winter vege seedlings, oh, and we even had time to demolish a whole basket of fejoas that Lisa bought along and feed the skins to our worms.

Pea Update and More

Our pea cups have had a week to grow and there have been some interesting results. The cup in the middle picture below was kept on someone’s windowsill. It was watered every couple of days just enough to keep the paper damp. It had light (but not direct sunlight) and moisture (but not too much). The cup on the right was in the bread box greenhouse. It was watered too but we’re wondering if it was maybe watered too well, because it seems to have drowned – perhaps we should have put drainage holes in the bottom of our cups.

When the peas (or at least the ones that are growing!) have developed a few more leaves, we’ll plant them into pots.

We were busy around the garden doing lots of other things too. One gardener noticed the basil had gone to seed and asked if she could collect and plant some of the seeds. What a great idea! If the plants grow well maybe we’ll even be able to sell some basil plants at our plant stall later in the year.

Other things we got up to today:

– We transferred some other pea seedlings that had been growing in little pots into the planter box. We’re getting really good at getting the seedlings out of the pots and securely into the ground, our practice last week has really paid off.

– The seeds we planted two weeks ago for our planned garden stall next term have all germinated and are growing nicely. We have had some really dedicated gardeners coming to keep these seedlings watered through the week and their work has paid off.

– Lisa and Ali brought some tomato plants from their gardens to transplant into our new greenhouse garden. Tomatoes are a summer crop, and if left outside over winter the plants will die in the cold conditions. But how will they get on in our toasty greenhouse? Will they survive? Will they flower and make tomatoes? We hope to find out over the next few months.

– A couple of weeks ago Lisa brought along a piece of sugar cane and put the end in a jar of water. She checked today and the stump has sprouted roots. Hopefully it will continue to grow and we’ll be able to plant some sugar cane in the school garden. A couple of our gardeners families grow it in their gardens at home.

A Super Busy Day

We did so much in the garden today. Hopefully all these pictures will help tell the story of the investigations and learning we’re doing.

Firstly we started a pea cup experiment with Clare. She gave each of us a few dried peas, a damp paper towel, and a biodegradable plastic cup (which we will reuse for other activities during the year). We scrunched up the paper towel and put it into the cup. Then we put the peas down the side of the cups nestled into the damp paper towel. Some of us will be taking the cups home, some will take them to their classrooms, and some will keep them in the greenhouse. Clare’s instructions are to keep the paper damp and the cups in a light place. What will happen?!

Some of our gardeners found an old bread bin in the rubbish skip and decided to turn it into a mini greenhouse. They’ve put their pea cups in there, and it will be very interesting to see if anything different happens to their cups.

Next we split into groups for some other activities. A couple of super strong gardeners offered to dig up the agapanthus plant growing by our gardens. They were very dedicated and kept at this task for the whole session.

Another group was keen to plant some spring bulbs and wildflowers under the trees. The bulbs went in, but we decided to germinate the wildflowers in trays in the greenhouse, and will transplant them when they’re a bit bigger. The reason for this is that the kikuyu grass is so vigorous that it will probably overpower our little wildflower seedlings unless we get them growing independently first.

Others planted silverbeet and carrot seedlings. We learned that we need to be really careful with the tiny roots of the seedlings. It’s very easy to damage them when we are taking them out of the punnet. Once they’re out we need to carefully disentangle each plant’s roots from the other without breaking them. And then we have to make sure we have a perfectly sized hole ready – the roots need to go well into the soil and be not left scrunched up on the surface. We saw that the plants that hadn’t had their roots well buried wilted very quickly in the sun. The roots are where the plant gets most of its moisture and nutrients, especially when it’s very small. Planting seedlings is actually quite a delicate and tricky job, and is much easier when there are two of you.

Lisa brought along some comfrey. Why is comfrey such a good plant to have in the garden? We can’t eat it, so why would we bother to grow it? Well, take a look at its incredibly long root and that might give you an idea of the answer…

A tap root this long can reach a long way into the soil and pull up nutrients that are buried way too far down for most plants’ roots to access. It brings those nutrients up closer to the surface for other plants to use, so it’s a great thing to have growing beside our fruit trees and vege plants. This is why comfrey’s leaves are often used to make fertiliser tea (like we made here), as they are also full of this goodness. And if that’s not enough, bees love comfrey flowers. And if bees come around to pollinate the comfrey flowers, they will also be pollinating the other flowers growing near them – namely our vege plants and fruit trees!

Luckily comfrey is really easy to grow and spreads like a weed. We can dig up the roots and chop them into pieces and each piece will sprout into a new plant once it’s buried. Lisa’s going to get a clump going by the greenhouse first, then once it’s established we’ll break it up and plant it under our orchard trees.

Early Autumn Planting and Prep

There were jobs to do around the gardens today so we were very lucky the rain held off.

One group went with Clare and planted seedlings in the garden bed we cleared a couple of weeks ago. We planted winter greens – silverbeet and spinach. We made sure to cover around the seedlings with pea straw and water them in well.

We also checked on our watermelon that’s growing over in the strawberry bed. We wondered how to tell when it was ripe, we did some research and discovered two ways:

1. Look at its belly: Watermelons have an underside, or belly, which is in contact with the ground throughout its growth, called a ‘field spot’. This spot on a ripe watermelon will be yellowish (sometimes referred to as ‘buttery’), and not white, which indicates an unripe melon.

2. Thump it: Rap on the middle of the watermelon while holding it up to your ear . A ripe watermelon will have a hollow sound when knocked, which sounds more like a ‘plunk’ than a ‘thwack’. An unripe watermelon will have more of a higher pitched sound.

We don’t think our watermelon is ripe yet but we will keep checking. In the meantime we watered it.

Meanwhile another group of gardeners had a different kind of job to do. During the week Lisa had very kindly dug out a strip of the greenhouse floor for us to turn into a winter greenhouse garden. The only problem was that the soil was very sandy, and in that state it wouldn’t provide much food for the roots of our plants. We knew we needed to enrich the soil, but what could we use?

Well… fortunately we made some compost last year. We made it out of trimmings and weedings and leaves from the garden, and from food waste like banana skins and apple cores from our lunchboxes. We thought surely that old rubbish couldn’t be much use to us, but when we checked the compost bin all we found was beautiful rich, dark soil (and quite a few bugs and worms). How fantastic that our waste could have turned into something so useful! We couldn’t even work out how much it would have cost the school to have bought in all that compost. It was another of those gardening win-win situations we love to discover.

So our gardeners did a great job of ferrying barrowfuls of compost over to the greenhouse and then carefully transferring it into the garden bed – superb co-operation and communication – while another group went around the school to collect dead leaves to add to the mix. By the end of the session the garden bed was looking a whole lot better, and ready for planting next week.

A Sweet Surprise

This week we got a bit of a surprise because Mr Reiger had decided to harvest our kumara for us. Thanks Mr Reiger, you saved us a lot of digging! Even though it was a bit earlier than we’d planned, there was still a good crop with some real whoppers.

Clare had the great idea of making chips with some of the harvest. So while a few hard workers went with Lisa to collect dead leaves for our compost and take care of the worms…

…it was over to the kitchen for the rest of us. Everyone pitched in. The kumara needed washing and cutting up:

Then we drizzled them with oil and popped them into the oven. While they were cooking some of our team got to work cleaning up the kitchen and all the equipment without even being asked, while others went back to give Lisa a hand in the garden.

25 minutes later and out came the goodies:

And the consensus? 19 out of 20 of us thought they were delicious! We even had enough to take a little sample back to our classrooms. Sorry we were so late back to class today teachers, we hope our koha of kumara chips will help you forgive us :)

There’s one more thing that Ali and Lisa want to mention about today. In the kitchen we were working together in a confined space using potentially hazardous kitchen equipment. We had to co-operate, share, communicate, listen, be patient and use our initiative. Our Kai Growers did all these things politely, enthusiastically and responsibly– we are very impressed with you all.

Welcome Back

Tahatai Kai Growers is back on board, bigger and better than ever. This year we have officially become a lunchtime elective option, and we had lots of keen gardeners lining up to join. We’re looking forward to an exciting year.

We started the term by doing a tour of our garden, to see what was going on. We went to check out the orchard and noticed that some of our trees had new branches sprouting out of the ground by the main trunk. The branches looked really strong and healthy - surely that was a good sign for our trees? It turns out not to be the case! To find the reason we had to take a step back and learn about rootstock.

What on earth is ‘rootstock’ you may ask? Luckily we had Lisa to explain to us. Imagine you have a tree with really strong, pest resistant roots but maybe not-so-tasty fruit. Meanwhile there is also a tree with really delicious fruit, but its roots are weak and susceptible to disease. How could you get the best of both worlds - a strong, healthy tree with delicious, succulent fruit? It turns out the answer is to use the roots of the strong tree, cut it off at the bottom of the trunk, and join the trunk of the fantastic fruiting tree onto it. It sounds crazy but it’s what is done to almost all our fruit trees, and it’s called ‘grafting onto rootstock’.

This all works great but what tends to happen is that the rootstock - because it’s so strong and healthy - likes to try and put out its own branches (called suckers) at the base of the tree. We don’t want the tree to put all its energy into growing these suckers because the fruit they produce won’t be tasty (we’d rather it concentrated on growing delicious fruit onto the grafted branches) so we need to prune the suckers off. Lisa showed us how. Now we know what to look for we can report to Clare and Lisa if we see suckers sprouting from any of our orchard plants.

We also noticed how the kikuyu grass is creeping in and taking nutrients from the soil that we want our trees to have. Kikuyu grass is very tough, it puts runners down very deeply and can regrow from just a broken little piece of root. We’re going to think this week about what we could do to try and control it.

We checked on the worm farms too. One was going well but the other was in a bit of a sorry state. What happened? Did it dry out? Did the worms starve? We’re doing our best to follow Leo’s advice from last year and get it pumping again.

As we continued our garden tour Lisa decided to check the kumara. Look what she found! Clare’s done some research and harvest time is end of March - beginning of April. We need to wait until all the leaves die back…can we hold off for another month?! We want to dig those kumara up and roast them for lunch this very minute!

When we first planted out the kumara, we also put some sunflower and swan plant seedlings around them to help them stay healthy. Well, they have certainly done a good job of that if the state of our sample kumara is any indication. But they’ve provided more than that - the swan plants have been attracting monarch butterflies all summer, and the sunflowers have made the most magnificent, beautiful display for everyone who goes past the school. Who’d have thought those tiny little seedlings that the boys planted out a the end of last term would get so big they’d be more than double our height? Even better, as their flowers die back their seeds will provide a huge feast for our local manu. It’s a win-win-win situation. Special thanks to Jacob for the sunflowers :)

SOLD OUT and Happy Holidays!

Garden Club at TCS was supposed to have finished last week, but someone forgot to tell these guys. They’ve been busy for the last two mornings before school selling off all the remaining produce from our Christmas in the Field stall. And sell it they did – we don’t have a single plant left!

What great dedication from our Kai Growers, and fantastic support from all the parents, staff and pupils who bought plants from us (with an extra big thank you to Tasha :) We will be really well set up for a great start to next year.

In the meantime, happy growing and happy holidays!

The End of 2017

Today was our last garden club session for 2017. The year has flown by, and just as our gardens have flourished and grown over the last four terms, so has our club.

There was no messing around on our last day though. Leo from Why Waste came back to see us and this time we talked compost. In order to grow healthy plants, our garden soil is always needing to be fed and enriched, and compost is a great way of doing this. It seems crazy that we need to buy compost to put in our garden at school while at the same time we throw away buckets and buckets of food waste from our lunch boxes every day, food waste that could be turned into beautiful, rich compost. So Leo came along to talk to us about how that might be possible.

We learned that compost needs four ingredients:

- Nitrogen: the ‘green stuff’ - food waste, fresh green leaves and grass, and basically things that rot down. This is where our lunch box leftovers come in.

- Carbon: the ‘brown stuff’ such as dried leaves and sticks, shredded cardboard and newspaper.

– Water: enough to help things break down without making a big rotten mess.

- Oxygen: to help the organic matter decompose.

With the proper mixture of water, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen, micro-organisms are able to break down organic matter to produce compost.

In order to run a productive compost system, every bucket of food waste that goes into it needs around to 15 buckets of dry, brown carbon matter mixed in. So if each of the 30 classrooms in our school produced a bucket of food waste a day, we’d need… well, you can do the maths but it comes to a whole lot of buckets of carbon. 

Our minds started to boggle! So we decided to start small, by building a tumbling composter, in order to get a handle on how the process works before we go any further. Leo had drawn us a plan:

…and brought along the big plastic drum. Mr Rieger gave us the posts, pole and tools and we got to work.

We didn’t quite get to finish though, because Clare had made a delicious lemon and coconut cake for an end of year celebration, and once she revealed that, all work came to a sudden halt. It must have smelled amazing because Mr Skilton and Mr Scott both turned up to have a slice. It was great to have them along to show them what we’ve been up to.

Clare and the volunteers are so proud of all our gardeners and what they’ve achieved this year. We have definitely been “learning, growing and gardening together”. It’s not just the growing that’s exciting to see, but the attitude of our gardeners. The respect everyone shows each other, the co-operation, support and good humour, the problem solving, creative thinking and ingenuity, all these things are what make it a pleasure to be part of the garden club. Tahatai Kai Growers, give yourselves a pat on the back. Have a great holiday and keep your home gardens growing!

“Ki te mea ka taka te kākano ki te wāhi e tika ana ka tinaku, ā, ka pihi ake he tipu hou.”                     If a seed falls in the right place it will germinate and a new seedling will sprout.

Thank you Clare and the volunteers for all your hard work this year.

Christmas on the Field

What a great day for a School Gala. We had so much produce to sell but the first step was to set the tables up (then move them around :). Our gardeners were there to lend a hand right from the start…

Then it was time to make some sales. Our team were absolute stars and did a great job of tagging in and out with each other so there was always help on hand. They drummed up sales, restocked produce, kept the tables tidy and handled the money all with beautiful manners and a smile for every customer.

We are so proud of all our Kai Growers! Thank you to the PTA for all their work running the gala, and to all the parents and customers who came and supported our stall.

Signing In

With only one day to go before we set up our stall at Christmas on the Field we were busy, busy, busy painting signs for all the things we are planning to sell and bottling up worm wee. It was such a hot day we had to move under the trees to stay in the shade – thanks, trees!

Mr Rieger’s Roses

We all know how lucky we are to have a caretaker like Mr Rieger (or ‘Mr Greg’ as he is often known) at our school. Not only does he take great care of the school grounds and buildings but he supports us gardeners with all the projects we do around the school, even though they sometimes make more work for him in his already busy days.

For example our fantastic school orchard used to be an empty grass lawn. Not so exciting for us or for the environment, but very easy to mow and keep tidy if you are Mr Rieger. But fill it up with rows of beautiful fruit trees and companion plants, and it means that to cut the grass Mr Rieger now needs to get the weed eater out and go around each and every tree by hand. Imagine how much more work that is for him! It would be so easy for him to be negative about these kind of projects but in fact he has been one of our biggest supporters. 

And it’s not just the gardeners of the school he supports. If a person ever needs help he’s there in a moment. He knows every student – and we are a school of over 700 pupils – and is there at the bike gate every day with an encouraging word or (more likely) a cheeky joke to see us safely on our way home.

Aa a way of showing Mr Rieger how much we appreciate him, Clare and some of the staff and school families decided to get together and make a rose garden for him. Last week Clare prepared the beds and planted the roses. The garden is by Mr Rieger’s shed, and faces out onto the road. So next time you are on your way to school and see the beautiful blooms lighting up your summers day, remember why they are there, and take the time to say a big thank you to our very own Mr Greg for all that he does for our school.

Crafting Action

The countdown to Christmas in the Field is on, so today we got busy making crafts to sell at our stall. You are not going to want to miss it! Today it was making grass seed heads, seed bombs, and potting up even more plants to sell. Here’s a sneak preview…

Our kumara are looking healthy, and now the patch is looking better than ever thanks to Jacob, who brought along some sunflower seedlings he grew at home. Jacob says that because the garden club has given him lots of plants, he decided it would be a nice idea to return the favour. Thank you for that lovely gesture Jacob, what awesome people our Tahatai Kai Growers are! Can’t wait to see how big they grow.

Going Potty

We had an extra, completely optional garden club session today, where the job was to pot up seedlings to sell at Christmas in the Field. Ali wasn’t expecting many people to turn up but she was completely wrong, everyone came and we even welcomed some new members.

So we got loads and loads of little seedlings transplanted and ready to sell. Some of us made plans for a mint-and-lemon water stand and a special passionfruit selling stall, too.

It is super exciting to see all the enthusiasm and effort being put in by our gardeners :))