Growing Together – Term 3 in Our School Garden
Term three has been another exciting season in our school garden, filled with planting, learning, and celebrating milestones. With the help of our tamariki, we’ve added two mandarin trees kindly sponsored by Tauranga City Council, an orange tree gifted by PIPS to mark the one-year birthday of our school garden and a peach tree donated by Te Puna Plum nursery. That brings us to a total of seven fruit trees in just one year!
Our young gardeners showed great teamwork as they dug the holes, planted the trees, and watered them carefully. These trees will take time to grow, but by the time our students reach Year 6, they’ll be able to harvest the very first fruit from the orchard they helped establish. It’s been wonderful to see how much interest and care the children put into this project.
We’ve also explored how much fun it is to cook with our garden produce.
The tamariki harvested fresh kale, cut it into pieces, tossed it with a little olive oil and a sprinkle of salt, and turned it into crispy kale chips. Simple, healthy, and so yummy! It was an experience they’ll never forget. Even years later, I still often hear: “Nina, do you remember when we cooked…?” Moments like these stay with them.
We also steamed our very own rainbow carrots and broccoli, and you could see from the children’s faces just how much they enjoyed eating fresh, healthy kai they had grown themselves. And with Shepard’s help, we had lots of fun making popcorn. The tamariki loved watching the kernels pop under the glass lid—and of course, the big question came straight away: “Can we do more?”Next term, we’ll be planting lots of popping corn in our garden!
This term we also began preparing for our root vegetable season. We started sprouting kūmara in a bath of water, growing our own tipu (shoots) that will be planted in November. We’re hopeful for another bumper crop, just like the one we enjoyed this year! At the same time, our seed potatoes were sitting on a sunny windowsill, getting ready to go into the ground. Just before the holidays, we held a big planting day where the children dug trenches and carefully placed the potatoes in rows.
We’ve also set up our very own Sentinel Garden! We became little garden detectives, looking closely for different kinds of pest bugs and checking our plants to see what we could spot. It was a fun way to learn how we can help keep our garden—and our environment—safe and healthy.
Each week the tamariki were able to take food home. It’s really important for them to share something with their whānau and show what they’ve discovered in the school garden—and there was plenty to go around!
As we head into early summer, the garden is bursting with life—our bumblebee garden is full of flowers, the fruit trees are blossoming, and we’re getting ready to plant our summer vegetables. With Christmas just around the corner, there’s so much to look forward to in the garden and beyond!
