Soil Prep and More Seed Harvesting

Continuing on from last week’s theme of seed harvesting, Miss Hunt brought along an ENORMOUS sunflower head from her garden. A fair bit of mahi was needed to break each hard little case open to get to the seed inside. Miss Hunt told us the greenfinches had been feasting on these seeds in her garden. Their perfectly adapted beaks can break the cases open far more quickly and easily than our big stumpy fingers!

We also got to work making stinky compost tea to help recondition our soil. We added horse manure, sheep pellets, seaweed, comfrey leaves, a handful of compost and a few grass clippings to buckets of water. Some of our gardeners showed good initiative and plant knowledge by also adding rosemary and lavender leaves to try and alleviate the smell of the manure…will they succeed? We’ll find out next week.

Back on Track

Welcome back to a new year in the garden! We are stoked to see some familiar faces this term, these are some of our most dedicated gardeners from last year and it will be fantastic to have their experience and leadership to help our new gardeners who are joining us for the first time this term.

We started our first session with a tour of our gardens. Here at Papamoa Beach we’ve been in a drought for the last few weeks, so water is scarce and even more precious than ever. Some of our orchard trees have really suffered. We have rain forecast for this week though, so we hope it comes in time.

Moving on to our garden beds, anyone might be forgiven for thinking they look somewhat neglected and unkempt…well, ok, they are a little unkempt due to us all having been on summer holidays, but there is also method to our madness. Look at the seeded lettuce head in the photo: instead of harvesting it (we just took some leaves from it every so often, but left the actual plant to grow) we’ve allowed it to produce flowers, which have fed the bees with nectar and pollen; in return they’ve pollinated the flowers, the flowers have produced seeds, and we can now collect the seeds to grow new plants. On this one branch of lettuce we have hundreds and hundreds of seeds – which means potentially hundreds and hundreds of new lettuces, all for free.

It’s not all dead and brown in our garden however. The jellybean tomatoes, which were planted in one of the shadier planter boxes beside the fence, are still producing delicious little tomatoes which were quickly snapped up and shared around. And this pumpkin plant had, until a few days ago, a great big pumpkin growing on it (unfortunately somebody came in and smashed the pumpkin up – pity they didn’t take it home and make some delicious soup with it instead! – but maybe we can collect some of the seeds lying around for next summer).

Next week we will be back to work getting our soil nice and healthy for our winter crops.

Haere Rā, Mrs Robertson

Mrs Robertson came to teach new entrants at our school this year, and at the start of Term 3 she found her way to the Kai Growers club. In the few months that she’s been helping us she has been simply amazing. It’s been great for the volunteers and Clare to have her involved, she’s able to give us a teacher’s perspective on the work we’re doing, she’s supported and encouraged us, and kept everyone organised and on their toes. She has given lots of her own time to come to meetings and help organise and run things like our Seedling Market. Most of all she has just been a wonderful person to have around.

Mrs Robertson is going back home to Invercargill in a couple of weeks. From our own, selfish point of view we really wish she wasn’t leaving! But we know she has her own adventures to continue with and we wish her all the very best. So Mrs Roberston, from all the kids and all the adults, we would just like to say:

THANK YOU SO MUCH, MRS ROBERTSON. WE WILL MISS YOU!

Safe travels, and please come back and visit us any time you like.

The Last Official Club Session of 2018

Today was the offical last day of Tahatai Kai Growers for the year – although we still have Christmas on the Field next week (if it stops raining!). Today we said kia ora to our volunteer whaea and of course to Clare, and had some fun in the garden eating, harvesting and measuring. Pretty much all of our Kai Growers are keen to come back next year, so this is not goodbye but more like “see you soon!”

Here we are eating some of the roast potatoes we grew; Clare sharing out the lemon cake she baked us; measuring our enormous sunflower in the wicking beds and measuring ourselves to see if we’re as tall as the sunflower; with an edible posy picked for a teacher, and…some guy eating pot noodles on his tractor :)

The TCS Kai Growers 2018!

The Seedling Market Story

Here’s the story of our Seedling Market and how our community came together to help…

Our four member schools had been planning a combined seedling market to be held just after the school holidays. We wanted to share our produce, and even more importantly our ideas, with our local community, and show them what we’d been learning and growing. We invited our neighbour school, St Thomas More, to have a stall too.

We had all been growing different plants from seed for a few weeks and Whaea Heidi from PiPS had organised for us to hold the sale at Arataki Park on Saturday. She did a lot of work to arrange it all, and other stalls like a coffee cart, bike repair stall, sausage sizzle and live music too.

But then a few things happened. Whaea Clare had to take some time off work for family reasons and there was a drought over the holidays. The result of these combined factors was that for most of our schools, our carefully nurtured seedlings died over the school holidays.

After all the work Heidi did organising and publicising the market she wasn’t going to give in! She put the word out and all sorts of people and organisations including the Mt College horticulture class and Good Neighbour came to the rescue, donating plants and produce to replace what we’d lost. In the end the market was able to go ahead, and despite some very cold and showery ‘spring’ weather it was a real success. In some ways it was even more of a success than if our plants hadn’t died because the generosity and help we got from others helped to form some great relationships.

Thank you to everyone who donated time or produce to help make it such a success against the odds, to the kids who helped out with selling, to Mrs Robertson and Mrs Taylor for all their mahi, and of course a very big pakipaki to Heidi and Clare.

PS: We were so busy selling and chatting that we forgot to take many photos! So you will just have to trust us that it was a great morning :)

Working on our Summer Garden

We got some fantastic news from Mrs Robertson today. She told us we had raised $260 at our seedling sale in the weekend! A huge thank you to Mrs Robertson for organising and managing our stall, and to James and Benny for helping run it. We‘ll put up another blog post all about the seedling sale soon.

Meanwhile it was back to the gardens for us. We all worked together to plant some corn seedlings. We learned that we should plant the corn in blocks, rather than long rows, because corn is wind pollinated. If the plants are in a clump there is much more chance of the pollen from one plant being blown to another plant than if they are in a long line.

Look at the long roots on some of these corn seedlings! Strong roots like this will give our plants a really good start in life.

We chopped down our lupin plants that were growing in another bed. Even though the lupins had pods growing on them that looked very much like beans, we learned that these weren’t for eating. In fact none of the plant was – not the leaves or the roots either. The reason we grew the lupins had nothing to do with what we could get from them, but what they would do for our soil. They are a really good way of returning nitrogen to the soil, which in turn will help the next crop of veges we grow in that bed to be strong and leafy. We did save some of the pods though, so we’d be able to grow more lupin plants next year.

And once again we did a great job of harvesting and eating from our gardens. More delicious sprouting broccoli, more cauliflower and lettuce. There was enough left over for James to take back to share with his class. And with all the wildflowers blooming in the gardens, we got a bit distracted picking bunches to take to our teachers and parents…that’s not a bad thing to be distracted by though, is it?!

Harvesting from the Wicking Beds

We were meant to be very busy today pricking out lettuce seedlings to sell at the seedling sale in two weeks’ time, and we were, at least for a while. But eventually the lure of all the beautiful, fresh produce in our wicking beds got too much. And what adult can resist hearing a bunch of kids BEGGING to be allowed to go eat their vegetables?! So it was over to the garden beds to harvest (and eat) cauliflower, sprouting broccoli, carrots, lettuce and kale.

A group of new entrants who had watched us transplant the carrot seedlings a few weeks ago had been eagerly monitoring their growth all this time, so we helped them pull up a carrot each. They were amazed to see how crooked some of them were, unlike the ones we find in the supermarket, not to mention how sweet they tasted. We realised the big ones might look the most impressive, but the smaller ones tasted the sweetest.

Why Do We Have a School Garden?

One obvious reason is that the students in our garden club, the Tahatai Kai Growers, can have experiences learning about growing their own food and understanding their natural environment. But ideally the garden is a place for every child (and adult) in the school community to use. Here is an example of one of the ways this can happen…

Our Kai Growers have been very fortunate over the last few weeks to have Mrs Robertson joining us in the garden at lunchtime. She’s giving up the one time in her working day she is able to be have a break from kids, to instead spend time helping us (and she is great at snapping us all into shape, too!).

During the week Mrs Robertson brought her class of new entrants out to the garden. With the help of Wian, one of our most experienced Kai Grower members, they did a fantastic job of harvesting loads of the veges our new wicking beds are producing. They parcelled up the veges into paper bags and put them into the staff room so our teachers could help themselves.

We think this is a great learning experience for the kids and for our ‘head gardener’ Wian, not to mention a bonus for the lucky teachers who got to take some fresh veges home. It’s what having a school garden is all about!

Check out these awesome photos Mrs Robertson took of her kids and Wian. Thank you so much, Mrs Robertson :)

Term 3 – It’s a Wrap

We kept at our spring preparation work today, there was lots to do.

We have lots of vege seedlings that Mrs Robertson has helped us plant sprouting in the greenhouse, and they needed watering.

Our straw bales are now well conditioned, so we were able to plant the strawberries and water them in well. Conditioning the bales means starting up the composting process. We have been adding water, blood & bone, lime and organic fertiliser into the bales for a couple of weeks now, to start the insides of the bales decomposing. This gives the roots of our plants a warm and nutrient-rich environment to grow.

Clare helped us dig our mustard crop into the soil in one of the kiwifruit bins. The mustard is a cover crop, which means we have grown it in order to replenish the soil with nutrients. So instead of harvesting a cover crop, we chop the plants up and dig them back into the soil.

Some of us were finishing off painting their signs and others were drilling and bolting theirs together.

We had lettuce to harvest from the wicking beds – we took some home and some to the staff room to share with our teachers.

And with Mrs Robertson’s help the kids had even found time to make thank you cards for Clare and the volunteers :)

It’s been awesome having Mrs Robertson helping us out this term. Thank you, Mrs Robertson, for sharing your time and your knowledge with us.

This was our last session for Term 3. We have a really good team going now, and are really looking forward to growing lots of summer crops in Term 4. Happy holidays, everyone!

Spring Blooms

Six whole months ago, at the start of autumn, some of us sowed wildflower seeds and planted flower bulbs under the trees. Well, we finally have our reward!

Spring Prep

For our first garden club session of spring we checked for kumara from last season (and found some gigantic worms), painted signs for our new garden beds, and sowed lots of seeds for our Great Seedling Swap challenge. For this challenge Garden to Table and Tui have supplied us with some seed raising mix and lettuce seeds. They’ve challenged us to  produce seedlings to sell to the public on the weekend of 27 October – that’s in about eight weeks’ time. As well as lettuce we sowed capsicum and chilli seeds. We hope to get together with the other PiPS schools and sell to the community together.

Savannah had a boiled egg in her lunchbox and remembered that eggshells were a good way to repel slugs and snails from our vege seedlings. Great thinking, Savannah!

Planting Out the Wicking Beds

At last we have space to plant all the vege and flower seedlings that have been waiting so patiently in the greenhouse! We filled half a bed with lettuce, half a bed with broccoli and a whole bed with carrots. We also planted our wildflower seedlings along the ends of each bed, to attract pollinating insects and add a bit of colour. Everyone got stuck in and stayed on task really well. 

Speaking of carrots, we decided to harvest the crop we planted in the old beds last term, and they didn’t last long! We completely forgot that along with the normal shaped carrots we’d also planted some round ones. These were very exciting to discover :)

Because our wicking bed area adjoins the rest of the school we now have lots of other kids and teachers coming to see what we’re doing. We showed some of the new entrants one of the carrots we’d harvested which they were very interested in, and we pointed out where all the new ones had been planted in the wicking bed. In a few weeks time the new entrants can come and harvest their own.

We also found a rogue radish growing with our wildflower seedlings. It was a split decision as to whether it was delicious or disgusting!

Wicking Beds Working Bee

The weather did turn out to be perfect, and it was heart warming and exciting to see the number of families arrive for the working bee. In fact we had so many hands that the job that was expected to take four hours was over and done within an hour and a half! Tu meke TCS!

The task was to fill the new beds with planting medium, but the way these wicking beds are filled is a bit more complicated than just loading them up with soil in the traditional way. For a step-by-step account of the process, take a look at this post on Mount Intermediate’s blog.

Filling the beds like this may take a bit more time and effort at this stage, but it’s going to be worth it. Instead of watering these beds from the top, like you’d usually do, these beds will be watered down a permeable pipe that runs along the bottom of the bed. The pipe will gradually release the water into the layer of sand at the bottom. The sand will hold the water while the plants’ roots grow downwards strong and deep to seek it out. This means there won’t be water sitting on top of the soil and evaporating like there would be in a usual garden bed. Better for our plants, better for our environment and better for our school’s water bill – everybody wins.

The Good Neighbour team briefing us on the process.

Placing the liner in the bottom of a bed. The liner will ensure the water gets held in the bed. 

Adding the permeable pipe along the bottom of the bed. The pipe has lots of small holes in it and has been wrapped in frost cloth. The water will still be able to pass through the frost cloth, but the cloth will prevent the holes from getting clogged with dirt.

The sandpit ‘donated’ the sand to cover the pipes at the bottom of the beds.

Once the pipes were covered with sand, 20cm of mulch was put on top of that. Then we added layers of pea straw and compost, building them up like a lasagne until the bed was full. 

Before we knew it the beds were ready to plant and it was time for our morning tea BBQ, all provided by Good Neighbour’s Food Rescue programme.

Great mahi everyone!

A gigantic thank you to all who came to help – the families, the teachers, the gardeners and of course Good Neighbour. Everyone who pitched in today has contributed to enriching both our school and our community. We’re sure the wicking beds will be an asset to our whole community for many years into the future.

Wicking Beds Arrive

Our wicking beds arrived in pieces today (Friday) along with Andrea and her team from Good Neighbour. They helped us assemble them and get them in place for tomorrow’s working bee – they look pretty flash, eh! The forecast is for perfect weather, so fingers crossed for a good turn out.

Planning Our New Garden Beds

Whaea Clare had some really exciting news today – thanks to some very generous sponsorship by TECT, the Fonterra Grass Roots Fund and Good Neighbour, we’ll be getting four big, new garden beds which will more than double our current gardens! The new gardens will be wicking beds (Whaea Heidi helped make some of these last year and you can read her report here).  Wicking beds are super water efficient planter boxes. Being water efficient will help our environment, our plants, and the school’s water bill.

Mr Skilton and Mr Scott have allowed us to take over a big space next to our existing gardens, so our garden area will also be more than doubled. Good Neighbour are making the beds and organising the installation. We’ll be having a working bee this weekend to fill the beds up and then it will be straight onto planting!

But before all that we needed to talk about the things we might want to plant, and see, in our big new garden space. There were lots of good thoughts for summer plantings, like tomatoes, cucumbers, corn and strawberries, and other ideas including having an entrance archway, pathways lined with herbs, a pizza oven and even guinea pigs (although Mr Skilton may take a bit of convincing on that one).

On this beautiful winter’s day we also had some welcome insect visitors to our garden :)

Potato Planting

Today we planted potatoes in the patch we used for our kumara last summer. We had to dig, fertilise (with sheep pellets) and measure before we and finally got to plant the potatoes in two rows. 

As exciting as the potato mission was, for most of our gardeners it couldn’t compete with the lure of the tree stump beside the garden bed that was just begging to be dug out. By the end of the lunch hour 75% of our gardeners were busy attacking the stump and only a dedicated few remained on task to actually get the potatoes into the ground. We wonder whether the potato saga will play out along the lines of the story of the Little Red Hen? 

At least everyone got some exercise and some vitamin D… and apparently everyone had a great time ;)

Mataraki Planting

It’s Matariki this week, traditionally a time for remembrance, celebration and fertility for Maori people. Among other things the appearance of the Matariki stars helped them decide when to plant their spring crops:

“The coming season’s crops were planted according to the portents read in the Matariki star cluster. If the stars were clear and bright, it was a sign that a favourable and productive season lay ahead, and planting would begin in September. If the stars appeared hazy and closely bunched together, a cold winter was in store and planting was put off until October.”

We’ll need to get up extra early this week to see what the stars look like, and figure out when in spring to plant our new crops!

Meanwhile to celebrate Matariki we did some planting. Some of us added two more citrus trees to the orchard. Our guys are pretty experienced at tree planting now and did a great job. We look forward to many years of crops from these trees.

A second group planted garlic in pots. We broke the bulbs into cloves – it was fun to see whose clove had the most bulbs, the record was 12 – then planted the cloves into pots, being careful to point them the right way up. The cloves of the elephant garlic were about ten times bigger than the other type! Elephant garlic is actually a type of leek, and although it’s cloves are much larger they are milder tasting. 

It takes half a year for garlic to grow, so we won’t be harvesting these until next summer.

School Supplies

Today Clare had a special request for some of the students who had planted vege seeds a couple of weeks ago. One of the Year 1 teachers wanted some seedlings for the gardens outside her classroom. Would our gardeners like to share some of the plants they’d been growing?

The answer was not just yes – our gardeners even offered to plant the seedlings for her. They were stoked to be supplying the school with plants. They did a great job.

A couple of months ago Clare had transplanted some of our tomato seedlings into this garden and the younger kids (and their parents) have apparently been enjoying snacking on the cherry tomatoes. Hopefully in a few weeks time they’ll have broccoli, carrots, broad beans and strawberries to eat too.

Pitto Planting

Mr Greg has been planting a pittosporum hedge along the front boundary of the school, and he asked Wian if he would put the last four plants in for him. Even though it was raining, Wian was up to the job. Greg told Wian he wanted the pittosporums planted one metre from the fence, and 75cm apart. Wian measured three times to make sure he got it right. He put sheep pellets in the holes so the roots would have nourishment while they settle into their new homes. Great work, Wian!

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.