Back in the Garden in 2021

It's a great pleasure to be back at Tahatai Coast School this year. Covid stopped a lot of our plans but we are so looking forward to being able to get a lot of growing under way.

We started the year seed saving the seeds from the summer crops and we are using them for planter boxes so we can make herb muffins at the end of the term (if all goes well).

The tamariki were amazed that they can grow more vegetables/herbs from the seed they have saved. The bean seeds we are saving for next years harvest. We really can’t wait for this to happen. We also made our own seed raising mix trying new recipes and have found one that works really well.

Whaea Clare showed us how to direct sow into the garden beds and we can’t wait to see how this will turn out.

We also had a big clean up from the summer and were amazed what vegetables grew well and which didn’t. Beans, tomatoes and corn were a hit this year.

Propogating from Stem Cuttings

We’ve been learning about propagating, which means growing new plants. There are lots of ways to do this, one is sowing seeds. We’re already quite good at that. Another is by stem cuttings, that is, taking a piece of stem of a growing plant and getting the stem to grow roots of its own either in soil or in water. Some plants are easier to propagate from stem cuttings than others. Softwood (new growth) stem cuttings can be taken in summer, while hardwood (older growth) stem cuttings are taken in autumn and winter.

We tried taking stem cuttings of some houseplants to see if we could propagate more plants to sell at Christmas on the Field. We decided to see if we could propagate these cuttings in water, so we could watch when (if!) roots started to form. It was pretty simple:

First we cut the stems just below a ‘node’. A node is a place on the stem where leaves and shoots sprout from. It’s usually a bump on the stem. If there are any leaves growing on this node we remove them, because this is the part that will be placed into the water, and hopefully where the new roots will grow from.

A stem with nodes that we have trimmed the leaves off.

Second we removed nearly all the leaves from the top. Why?! Well, if there are a lot of leaves the new plant will put all it’s energy into keeping them alive and healthy, leaving it no strength to grow new roots. The plant does need some leaves, so it can photosynthesise (make energy from sunlight), but at this stage, not very many at all. If there are any buds or flowers on our cutting, we remove them too. As sad as that seems it’s for the same reason, right now we want the new plant to focus on growing roots, not making flowers.

We popped the stems into a cup of water, making sure that the nodes were covered.

And then we put the cups in a light, bright, but not too hot place. All we needed to do now was to keep the water fresh, and watch and wait.

Here are our cuttings when we took them four weeks ago…

…and here they are now. Look at those roots! The new plants are ready to be potted up.

A close up of roots growing from a node.

Getting Crafty

Here’s a quick peek at some of our Kai Growers putting their artistic skills to use for our school gala, Christmas on the Field, in a few weeks. We’ll show you the finished products next week!

The Fantastic Miss Hunt

We really are lucky to have Miss Hunt as part of our Kai Growers Club. Not only is she a very experienced teacher, great at keeping us all on track, but she knows loads about plants and gardening too. Every Wednesday she gives up her lunch hour to pass on her knowledge and passion for growing things, when she could be putting her feet up in the staffroom.

The balcony by her classroom is a safe place to keep our seedlings and she makes sure they are watered regularly. In the past this has been a real problem for us. When we had to keep our seedlings down by the gardens, we used to lose a lot of them because seedlings need very regular watering and care. Whaea Clare and the volunteers aren’t at school every day, and it was hard for the students to go down to the gardens so often – they have so much else to do at school, and they don’t have independent access to the hose. But none of this is a problem any more, because now our baby plants get to live on Miss Hunt’s balcony where they are under her watchful eye and she can remind the students to water them every day!

The last few weeks Miss Hunt has been taking groups of students over to the kitchen. They’ve made kale chips and, this month, spinach dip. She must be an excellent cooking teacher too, because who has ever seen kids eating their greens with such enthusiasm?

Thank you, Miss Hunt, for all the mahi and encouragement you give our Kai Growers :)

Bizzy Bees

Whaea Clare asked Sylvana, from Seaside Bees, to come and speak to some of the Year 3 and 4 classes because they were learning about bees. Seaside Bees rent and manage urban beehives and give a lot of their time spreading the word about bees at schools, garden clubs, garden centres and community groups.

Sylvana bought along a piece of an actual working bee hive! There were bees, honey still in its wax comb, and bee larvae and eggs. Somehow everything the students had been learning about bees made a whole lot more sense (and got even more interesting) when they got to see the real thing!

Ngā mihi tino aroha ki a koe Sylvana.

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 :)

Sharing the Fruits of our Labours

The weather may be a bit brisk but some plants actually prefer that. Winter veges like brassicas (broccoli, kale, cauliflower and cabbage), spinach and silverbeet, carrots, peas, lettuce and coriander are all flourishing in our garden and we’ve had plenty to take home and to share with our teachers.

Our efforts in caring for our soil by feeding and mulching it must be paying off. Look at the size of the silverbeet we’ve grown!

When we heard that Mr Skilton was wanting some coriander plants for his home garden, we raced into action. We dug a couple of seedlings up from the garden beds – being extremely careful to dig down deeply so we didn’t damage the roots – potted them up and whisked them straight over to his office. He was very pleased!

Making our own Seed Raising Mix

Because the soil isn’t reliably warm yet we sowed loads of different seeds into punnets, using seed raising mix we made ourselves. Here’s the recipe:

Mix together:

1 part sand (the salt from beach sand can damage or kill young seedlings, so horticultural sand is best)

2 parts coir fibre

3 parts compost (or 2 parts compost, 1 part vermicast)

Whaea Clare brought along the coir and the compost, and Mr Skilton kindly let us have a bucket of sand from the school sandpit.

First we sifted the compost to get all the chunky pieces of bark out. Big bits of bark are too hard for tiny seedlings to push their way past! Then we added water to the dehydrated coir fibre and watched it expand. We mixed everything together like we were making witches brew, filled up our recycled punnets and planted our seeds.

We put our punnets up on Miss Hunt’s balcony, which is sheltered from the weather. It’s also close to the classroom and the sink so with her help we were able to keep an eye on them and keep them regularly watered.

It was amazing how quickly some of our seeds sprouted!

Here are some of the seedlings about 8 weeks later…

Busy in June

What busy weeks these have been in our gardens. In between planting our crops of spinach, lettuce, cabbage, silverbeet, lettuce, broccoli, kale, beetroot and carrots we have learnt about the insects that are in our gardens.  

We went on a bug hunt to see what insects we could find around the school and we were disappointed not to find many.  We did find worms which was very exciting. We talked about what plants we could plant that could attract more of these insects into the gardens and we made a simple bug hotel with plant pots and what we could find around the school in the hope that this would help attract some more as well.

We talked about the ‘beneficial’ insects who help the gardens by eating the destructive insects. Many beneficial insects also pollinate the flowers of our crops, so there are many reasons to encourage them into our gardens. This is one reason we don’t use any pesticides in our school gardens – these chemicals may kill the insects we don’t want, but they’ll also destroy the beneficial ones too. To attract beneficial insects to our garden in spring we planted a blend of seeds called ‘Beneficial Insect Blend’. 

We also talked about the undesirable insects and how to prevent them coming into our garden, and if they do invade, how we control them without using pesticides. 

Because the soil that’s growing our vegetables is a living thing, we talked about how we could feed it so in turn it will feed our growing vegetables. We watched Whaea Laura’s video about soil conditioning and how we can feed the soil with thing lying around our houses. We learnt that banana skins and egg shells are great food for the garden. We talked about gathering leaves and seaweed which also feed the garden and are great mulches as well.  

Whaea Clare had bought banana skins, egg shells, seaweed and leaves and we cut these up and put into the garden beds. We’re eager to see if they help our veges grow big and strong.

The last week of term coincided with the annual ‘New Zealand Garden Bird Survey’, so we discussed how we could participate in our own backyards. We also made bird feeders to feed the birds in our gardens at home. We used dripping, wild bird seeds and some raisins. The dripping smelt terrible but we knew it was good protein for the birds.

 We also handed out harvests of spinach, herbs and rhubarb to our school community.

AND were given a voucher from Paper 4 Trees for 52 plants for our school gardens, a result of the paper our school recycles. Watch this space to see what we will do with these.

Back to the Garden after Lockdown!

It was great to be back in the garden today after so many weeks away, and we had quite a little adventure seeing what was growing and what had changed.

We discovered:

Our spinach, silverbeet, lettuces and spring onions were going fantastically. We had enough to pick and take home to share with our families, that’s if we could stop ourselves eating it all first. It’s always super exciting to harvest some of what we’ve grown ourselves, and for some reason these veggies seem to be so tasty that we happily nibble away at them straight out of the garden.

Our brassicas – the broccoli and kale – weren’t there at all.They had been appreciated by the cabbage white caterpillars while we’d been away. In fact they’d appreciated them so much that they had eaten the plants to practically nothing, despite our attempts to cover them with netting. Over the lockdown some of the staff had kindly cleared the stalks away for us.

Our thyme plant had also grown really well. Some of us had a taste and discovered it’s one of those very strong flavours which is better mixed in with other foods than eaten by itself!

Once we’d re-familiarised ourselves with our garden, we set about doing a bit of planting. Our seedlings that Whaea Clare had carefully nurtured for us over lockdown were more than ready to go into the ground, most of them had roots coming out of the bottom of their punnets. We planted beetroot, spinach and more brassicas. Now that the weather is colder there aren’t any cabbage white butterflies around, so these ones should be safe from their hungry caterpillars.

We also sowed some fast growing green crops in between the bigger plants. We’ll be able to harvest these relatively quickly while the big plants are still growing. The green crops only have shallow roots, so won’t get in the way of the deeper roots of the bigger plants. And they will also cover the bare soil quickly – nature doesn’t like bare soil and if we don’t cover it up, she will do it for us with weeds :) Because we just LOVE to take things home with us from Garden Club, some of us also sowed seeds of winter greens into punnets to grow at home.

The Covid 19 Lockdown

In Aoteaora the whole country went into strict lockdown for a month between 25th March and 28th April, to contain the spread of the Covid19 virus. That meant no school, no playdates, no sports – in fact apart from going for some exercise near home with our ‘bubbles’ (the people in our immediate households) we couldn’t even leave our homes. We couldn’t see our friends or even whanau who didn’t live with us. It was weird, but we were able to connect with friends and family and our teachers over Zoom and Skype. We even had meetings with our teachers and classes over Zoom, which was fun.

After the Level 4 lockdown we were in Level 3 for a couple more weeks which also meant no school. Even when we were able to go back to school, we had to observe a lot of strict hygiene measures including no mixing in groups. So it wasn’t until the end of May that we were able to start back at Kai Growers. It was great to see everyone again and compare notes of the gardening some of us had done at home.

A Well Organised Garden and the Bean Experiment Results

This month we were focusing in on planting out our seedlings so we could grow veges for the school community. We planted out silverbeet, spring onions, broccoli, carrots, lettuces and spinach. We did this every two weeks so that we would always have produce to sell. This is called successional planting. We also sowed some seeds ready for the next round of planting.

Remember our bean experiment? We’d been learning about “What is a Seed and How Does It Germinate?”, and to see the germination process in action we grew some beans in clear ziplock bags. Well, most of our beans were able to germinate. The ones that didn’t we realised had mostly been over-watered, resulting in them going mushy and mouldy, or under-watered, in which case they just remained dry and hard. We found the seeds definitely needed moisture, but not too much of it!

Most people kept their resulting bean seedlings at home, but we planted a few of them into our school garden.

Unfortunately due to COVID-19 we had to stop holding Kai Growers meetings in the middle of the month, and shortly after that our kura had to close. The day before lockdown Whaea Clare went to check the gardens and it looked like the spinach was ready to sell, so hopefully by the time we get back the rest will be nearly ready too.

Whaea Amber and her daughter stopped by the gardens during the second week of lockdown and took these pictures for us. We can’t wait to see how it’s all growing now.

Our silverbeet, broccoli, rhubarb and lettuces are looking great.

And here are the seeds we sowed before lockdown for our successional planting. Whaea Clare took them home to be looked after when the school was closed. Looks like we’ll have plenty to plant out when we get back into the Kai Growers gardens!

The Bean Experiment

For the last two weeks we’ve been investigating what goes on inside a seed.

Last week Whaea Clare explained what a seed is made up of, and showed us a pretty funny video that explains what happens when it germinates. We watched as the seed shed its coat and broke open, firstly putting out a root and then a stem. We saw the roots spread out in the earth, searching for nutrition and water, and the leaves start to unfurl to gather energy from the sun.

Clare gave us some bean seeds to dissect so we could see all the parts. Beans are a good seed to use because they’re big. Some seeds are smaller than a grain of sand, so we’d need a microscope to look at those!

Now for our experiment. We each took a couple of seeds and wrapped them in a moistened paper towel, then sealed them into ziplock bags (compostable ones of course). Whaea Clare said to keep them in a light place like on a windowsill, make sure they stayed damp but not wet, and to gently check on them each day. Stay tuned for the results!

Welcome to 2020

Kia ora everyone and welcome back to Tahatai Kai Growers.

Whaea Clare and the volunteers are looking forward to doing lots of growing and learning with our gardeners. We have plenty of new faces and we’re glad to see a few experienced ones back too.

This year our goal is to be able to regularly share produce with our TCS community. So we will be growing a few crops on a rotational basis so we (almost) always have something to harvest every week, which we plan to put out on a sharing table after school each week.

We started this week by planting up seedlings of broccoli, spring onions and lettuce. We interspersed the lettuce seedlings with carrot seeds.

Miss Hunt showed us how to plant spring onion seedlings.

We learned to make sure the roots of the seedlings were well covered by the soil, because if they dry out the plants will die.

Broccoli and spring onions planted!

Preparing for Christmas on the Field

Today we continued our preparations for Christmas on the Field, our school gala, which is only three weeks away. Last Wednesday we sowed loads and loads of seeds in punnets. Here’s what we got up to today:

We got creative, painting garden stones to sell. We had to be careful not to get paint on our uniforms because we were using permanent paint – water-based paint wouldn’t be much good on stones that are going to live outside in the garden. Once the paint is dry we’ll put a coat of sealant over the paint to give it extra protection.

We also harvested seeds from some of Ms Hunt’s sunflowers from last year. We put them in bags and labelled them to sell. It’s quite incredible to think that these little seeds can turn into plants as huge and glorious as the ones we grew last year (see one here).

Meanwhile our senior gardeners were busy keeping our garden areas ticking over. They used their muscles to deliver wheelbarrows full of aged horse manure to our orchard trees. They spread a layer of pea straw mulch over our garden beds which are drying out a lot in the spring winds. They shifted a raspberry plant and did lots of general tidying up.

Ben and Ryan, two of our garden leaders, used their initiative to help two junior students plant a punnet of seeds each. It was great to see their empathy as they mentored the younger ones, firstly noticing their interest and then following through, explaining what to do and helping when needed. Well done boys, for showing real Garden Leader-ship :)

Rhubarb Crumble

A couple of weeks ago Lesley, Jake and Devon were looking in the garden beds. When they got to the rhubarb the boys started talking about rhubarb crumble. Lesley had never eaten it – it’s not a common dish in South Korea.

So the boys decided to make rhubarb and apple crumble for Lesley to try. During the week the three of them found a recipe, copied it out, and organised to each bring in different ingredients.

After all that planning, finally today was cooking day. Firstly they went to the garden and cut some rhubarb.

Next they washed their hands. Then they washed the rhubarb and apples, cut them up, put them in the dish, and sprinkled over the sugar.

To make the topping they combined flour, rolled oats, brown sugar and olivani. The olivani had to be mixed in by hand which was a bit gross. Then they covered the fruit with the topping.

They took the crumble and all the dishes down to the staff room kitchen. Nobody could start the oven up and that was a bit of a worry until Mr Greg came to the rescue. Then the crumble went in, and while it was cooking they did the dishes and watered the seedlings in the greenhouse.

Finally the crumble was ready. A slice each to test, one to take home, and some for the teachers too. Oh, and don’t forget Mr Greg, for fixing the oven for us.

What was the verdict? Everyone loved it. In fact Mr Greg said it was the best crumble he’d ever eaten!

Sowing for the Seedling Sale

As we did last year, all the PiPS member schools will be getting together to hold a community seedling sale this spring. This time around we’ll have even more schools participating, so Clare has given each school a different list of plants to grow. This means we’ll have the best variety of plants on sale and won’t end up with loads of one thing and nothing of another.

Our list includes pumpkins, squash, beans and sunflowers. The sale is in six week’s time, so we got busy this week sowing our seeds.

This year we are also doing our best to reduce our use of plastic, and set an example to our community, so we’re experimenting with growing our seedlings in compostable punnets. The punnets are made of cardboard like egg cartons, and can be planted straight into the ground, where they will disintegrate allowing the roots of the seedling inside to continue to grow into the soil.

We also checked our pea seedlings in the garden beds and found the slugs had been very busy on them. We realised this was because the seedlings had been trailing along on the ground, making them an easy feast. Clare used some strands of flax fibre that were lying around to tie the seedlings onto the stakes until they’re big enough to climb up them themselves. That should keep them a bit safer!

Munching Madness

What’s going on with our cauliflowers and cabbages? Why are their leaves turning into green lace?

Here’s the answer…

Winter Seed Sowing

It was raining cats and dogs today, but luckily Mrs Jacob and Mrs Williams have joined the Kai Growers ranks, and we were able to use Mrs Williams’ balcony to sow our winter seeds.

Taking a lesson from last year, when we had trouble identifying our seedlings when we held our seedling stall, we were super careful to accurately label all our pots this time.

Pesto Party

Today we made basil pesto, yum yum yum…

Step 1: Harvest the basil (we have LOTS).

2. Blend the basil with parmesan cheese, cashew (or pine) nuts, olive oil, lemon juice and garlic.

3. Place on top of crackers or add to cooked pasta (or just eat it off a spoon ;)

4. Serve and enjoy. That’s a delicious way to get your greens for the day!