The Arataki School Gardeners, Term 4

This term Whaea Maeve started at Arataki School with the young gardeners.  She is a keen gardener and is excited about working on creative projects with the young gardeners.

This term some of our tamariki learned how to make their own seed raising mix and planted sunflowers in cups to take home and water until they are big enough to plant in the garden.  They’ve loved spending time in the gardens, discovering herbs and edible flowers and naming all the veg.

 Our years 3 and 4 have been busy working on a rongoā māori project, making kawakawa balm and learning about its healing properties.  It’s been an exciting process, from leaves, oils and beeswax to the finished product, with labels beautifully decorated by the children. 

The Lunchtime Garden Club have planted dahlias and sunflowers at the front of the school, to bring some colour to the entrance area.  They have been testing some wool mulch mats too, to keep the pesky slugs and snails at bay - some of our gardeners are more keen to relocate the snails to the compost bin, which also works a treat!!  We are working on harvesting greens and clearing some of the overgrown areas of our garden beds too, to make way for planting corn and beans and planning for the development of our sensory garden is well underway.

 Our new entrants have cleared and added compost to the triangle garden outside their classrooms before planting sunflowers and a wildflower mix.  They love watering their gardens, so we should have lots of colour there shortly!  They are an artistic bunch, and did some awesome garden artwork last week.  This week they made paper seed trees, to plant mesculun for salads, tricky work for small hands.

DoC Ranger Josh Comes to Visit

A big highlight this term was DoC Ranger Josh’s talk on Mauao and native trees. He has a wealth of local knowledge and presented the school with a totara seedling.

The Hopukiore group had a great term in the garden, appling science and technology and making their own planter to take home.

New Students and New Plants

Whaea Sarah has been working with the new entrants classes, teaching them basic gardening knowledge before they start with garden club in year 1.

Room 3 started their journey by sowing sweet pea seeds on the first day of gardening club. 

The children got to water them, learn about how important the soil is by feeding it and looking after it, they learn about compost and worm farms and watch the process from seed to it sprouting in class.

It’s an exciting day when we plant them out into our gardens. Some children love them so much they get taken home to be cared for.

Term 2 Update

Term 2 saw us back in 3 classrooms teaching around 60 tamariki.

We worked with ruma 3, 6 and 18.  Later in the term we did some work with one of the senior classes.  It was so lovely seeing the tamariki back out in the gardens having fun and learning about how to garden.

In the morning tea and lunch times groups of tamariki would come out and help me and Whaea Sarah in the gardens.  It’s such a privilege to spend this time discovering and pottering in the garden and seeing the tamariki returning to class with muddy hands (even though we were meant to be preparing for the next lesson).

Ruma 6 had a blast on their treasure hunt finding kumara that we planted last year.  The excitement at finding them buried in the soil was contagious as we tried to the find the biggest, skinniest and longest ones.  In term 3 we are going to do some baking with them –  not sure if we are going to make kumara soup or kumara chips, ruma 6 can’t make their minds up.  What do you think they will pick?

We also planted peas in cups with ruma 3 and 6 so they can see how seeds germinate.  They loved following the seed’s journey to becoming a seedling.  They then planted out their seedlings into the garden and will be excited to see them growing in term 3.

The tamariki also learnt how soil is made and about composting and worm farms.  Matariki was also celebrated by planting an orange, apple and mini kowhai tree (dragon gold).  Ruma 3 talked how they will be able to follow the apple tree’s progress throughout their schooling.  As the apple tree grows bigger, so will they.

Ruma 18 sowed seeds and watched them grow and planted them out.  We made newspaper pots for the seedling that needed more time.  Made our own worm farms.  Learned about how soil is made and LOVED finding the worms and learning about the soil food web.   We had so much fun with Whaea Sarah making our own fertiliser and learning about soil conditioning, then a group learnt how to prune the fruit trees.

Who is Whaea Sarah you may ask?  Whaea Clare had to go into surgery for her wrist so is off for half of term 2 and half of term 3,  the lovely Whaea Sarah has taken over and is doing an amazing job. Thank you Sarah. Can’t wait to see what happens in Term 3.

Term 1 News

Wow what a term it was.   With Covid in the community we decided that I would work with one classroom. 

 I was privileged to work with the Montessori class, where we took a closer look at plants.

 It was a busy learning term and I really enjoyed working with the children, following their interests and getting more in depth about how plants work.

 We started from when they were a seed and what they need, right through to their roots, stems, leaves and what parts make a flower.

 I learnt so much and loved how the kids got excited about their gardens and how they worked.

 We talked about sprouts vs microgreens and the class cooked with the microgreens once they had grown.

 We looked at the soil and roots through microscopes, dug in the compost bin to find insects, fungi and bacteria.

We learnt to make a square foot garden so each child had their own square to grow whatever they wanted.  At the end of term they cooked with their vegetables or took them home.

 Thank you Montessori for having me in Term 1.

Whaea Clare

Mauao Seed Saving - Collection Day

What a stunner of a day it was to go up Mauao for our annual seed saving day.

We had a great turn out of kids from our local schools including their parents who also came along to this special project. 

Josh the environmental manager of Mauao met us all in the morning and while our group was walking up the Mount he gave us a bit of history about some parts of Mauao. He showed the kids how to find the seeds from native plants.

The seeds we have collected will be planted by the tamariki in our schools and once the seedlings have reached a certain size they will be planted on another special day back at Mauao in an area which has been saved for us.

The kids had so much fun collecting the seeds and Josh was great at sharing his knowledge. 

We are very grateful that Josh took his time to give us this tour and it was all in all a very special day and a great experience for everyone !

End of Year Report for 2021

Wow, what a year for our Garden Club.

We started Term 1 with no idea what this year would bring. By Term 2 our garden had moved down to the bottom of the field, with no water supply. And we had another lockdown, with all the upheaval and uncertainty that goes with it.

I’m so proud of the tamariki this year, they have shifted so much soil, rolled with whatever was happening around the school and in Garden Club, and worked really hard on getting our garden up and running in its new space.

We also said goodbye to an amazing group of year 6’s, some of whom have been with the PiPS programme since starting school at 5 years old. I wish them all the best with Intermediate and can’t wait to see them on Fridays.

In exciting news, our new shed has been built. Thank you so much to the Lion Foundation for funding the shed. It means so much to myself and the tamariki having everything close by. Also thank you to Alun, Steve, Rose and Charlie for all your hard mahi (and sunburn) building the shed.

Thank you to Dianne, Rose and Vicky for volunteering your time on Thursdays helping me run the Garden Club. Thank you for your weekend work and out of hours work too. Your support is invaluable.

Whaea Clare

Our Automatic Watering System

We haven’t had water down in the garden club since our move down to the bottom of the field. In the winter it was fine but now that it’s spring and hotter days are happening, we need to come up with a system to water our seedlings.

Whaea Clare read about OLLA water system. This system has been used for centuries, mostly in hot climates like Central America, Africa and the Mediterranean. It uses terracotta pots which are filled with water and buried in the garden. The water slowly seeps out over time, going directly to the roots under the ground and avoiding the evaporation that would occur if it was sitting on the soils surface. Over time the roots find their way to the pots as well – it’s fascinating watching them gradually seeking out the source of the water.

Another beauty of this system is its simplicity. All we had to do was to get a large terracotta pot with a lid (we got one from Bunnings). Then we filled the hole in the bottom of the pot with the blu tak, dug a hole big enough for the pot in the centre of the garden bed, placed the pot so that the top was just above soil level, then filled it with water. We then put the lid on top of the pot and that was that! Our plants will be watered through the week while we are away from the gardens.

If you want to know more here is a great link:

https://lovelygreens.com/how-to-make-diy-ollas-low-tech-self-watering-systems-for-plants/

Busy Times Ahead in the Garden

Can you believe we only have seven weeks to go for the term – we’re going to have to work really hard to get everything done but it’s going to be fun.

PiPS is holding a seedling sale on 21st November we started sowing seeds for the sale. Kings Seeds gave us an amazing discount on seeds, so thank you very much to them! We each got to take some seed punnets home too, we did two for school and one for home.

The BoP Regional Council’s Environmental Enhancement Fund also donated some rain jackets to us, which we were able to use today. It was fun doing some gardening in the rain.

We also harvested our many peas that we found hiding in amongst our kale and spinach. We couldn’t believe that we could grow this surprise. We also had heaps of kale and silverbeet which we took home to make kale and silverbeet chips. Yummy.

Whaea Clare couldn’t believe we could grow carrots as well, because at home hers always fail. She’s very proud of what we can grow here.

The Next Step for our Mauao Seedlings

Today was an exciting day for us all as our Mauao seedlings were ready to be transferred into individual pots. This is known in gardening-speak as ‘pricking out’. Over the last three months the seeds have become strong, healthy seedlings, which was very exciting for us to see. However they were getting very squashed together so it was definitely time to give each seedling its own space to grow.

We learned how to use ice blocks sticks to gently tease the roots out of the soil, and to hold the seedlings very gently by their stems so as not to damage the roots. We filled the pots 3/4 full with potting mix, made a hole in the middle and placed the seedling in very carefully, making sure the hole was deep enough that the roots wouldn’t be squashed up or left on the surface. Then we filled the pots the rest of the way and watered the seedlings in. The final step was putting our names onto each plant we’d worked on, so we can plant out our own seedlings onto Mauao in future.

Whaea Clare says “It was lovely to see the pride the tamariki took in the seedlings and how much aroha they gave them.”