Arataki School Gardens Term 2, 2025
This term, our gardeners on Tuesdays were from Mangatawa and Mauao and we worked, as usual, with keen gardeners from lots of different classes and year groups at lunchtime too! Our winter gardens are looking good already! We started out from the beginning, with seed sowing. Following an experiment in Mount Maunganui Intermediate gardens, we have found
that sowing seeds in rolls of wool (rescued from frozen food packaging) produced stronger, healthier seedlings and in a much shorter time period. The wool keeps the soil warm and damp, the perfect conditions for growth, while the roots also have more space to grow, resulting in healthier plants. This method also means that we no longer rely on plastic pots. The gardeners enjoyed trying this new method, rolling up the seedraising mix in the wool - ‘like making sushi!’
We have started preparation for our term 3 project - a bumblebee hive! Thanks to the NZ Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Arataki School is being gifted a bumblebee hive in term three. Our senior gardeners have cleared and planted two of our garden beds with a special wildflower mix, which will support our hive and have been popping out of class regularly to keep the beds watered. Our new fuzzy friends will increase the biodiversity in our gardens and, as they are amazing pollinators, we are expecting that having them around will mean that we have more well laden fruit trees and vegetables for the upcoming seasons. We are also looking forward to a visit from experts at the Bumblebee Trust, to learn more interesting facts about the bees.
Once we’d planted out the broccoli and cauliflower seedlings into the garden beds, unfortunately everyone wanted them! The slugs and snails were the first to feast, so we made slug traps from plastic containers, filled with flour, yeast, sugar and water, to tempt the non-swimmers to a dip. It seems to be working well. As for the very hungry caterpillars - our gardeners love checking the leaves for invaders and re-homing them in the compost!
Our pātaka kai had plenty to offer this term too - from silverbeet and spinach to raspberry canes and strawberry plants! Our gardeners are proud to share what we grow in the gardens with our school whānau - once they have taken some produce for their own families first!
After nearly four months in the ground, our kumara was ready to harvest just before Matariki. It’s always such an exciting activity. The gardeners were excited to pull off all the dying greenery to add to the compost and then the digging for treasure began. They shouted and squealed as they discovered the kumara in the soil, comparing sizes and holding them in the air and they took home bags of them, before leaving some extras in the pātaka kai, where they didn’t last long!
Another great Autumn activity this term was sweeping up dried leaves from around the school buildings to add to our compost. We learned all about why trees have leaves and how these mini solar panels transform sunlight into food for
the trees and the plants, eventually nourishing us too! We learned how trees drop their leaves to protect themselves from the extra weight during winter storms and to feed themselves as they compost below the trees, when the sunlight is not as abundant.
We also learned all about our Sentinel Garden and how we use it to keep an eye out for invasive pests, providing the first line of defence to warn our local orchardists, so that they can protect their crops. One wet Tuesday we played snap in the community room with ‘most unwanted’ cards, to get to know the pests we are watching out for!
To finish up the term, we spent a fun morning in the community room, making green ‘Shrek’ smoothies - before our senior
students ran to catch the bus to watch Shrek the play, at Mount Maunganui Intermediate! The highlight for the junior classes
was posing for photos with green moustaches, thanks to all the yummy NZ spinach they added!
