Term 3 in our Garden

We are beyond thrilled to have a warm (hot!) and dry space to work in on those windy and rainy days, a place where we can raise seedlings and even get a head start with summer crops!

The greenhouse was built on a cold and wet weekend by Oceanside Builds and we couldn’t be happier with the space. By the end of the term we have a wide variety of summer vegetables and flowers sprouting which should be ready to go into the garden after the holidays.

For the first time we are growing our own kumara tipu, which is the offshoots that grow from one of the previous seasons’ kumara. We saved four of our biggest kumara from earlier in the year and set two in water, and two buried in a mix of pumice and top soil to see which ones grow the best tipu. Already there is lots of healthy foliage, and hopefully lots of healthy roots!

We have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of a leafcutter bee kit which arrived this term! It was so interesting looking at the little cocoons made purely from leaf circles that the female bees cut to house their egg. We did a fun activity making finger puppet bees, drawing flowers and then pretending to be bees! Each flower had a little bit of “pollen” in it, in the form of sprinkles, sugar, desiccated coconut etc, and these little bees with a touch of honey on their finger buzzed around collecting pollen from each other's flowers…. (Yum!). The leaf cutter bee nest has been attached to the outside of the greenhouse, at the start of term 4 the cocoons will be put into it and within a few weeks we should see leaf cutter bees pollinating our real flowers!

It has been a term of projects, and one of the favourites was the creation of ‘Cupcake’ the toddler scarecrow. Cupcake was made by Manawa Hau Kotahi using soft plastic recycling to stuff their limbs and body. We decided the most important garden that needed protecting from birds was of course the strawberry garden! In the future we will add some ribbons from Cupcakes arms that will flap about and help deter the birds.