Golden Sands Gardening Term 3
It has been a busy and productive season in our gardens! We kicked off the term working with Clare, learning about seed raising where we explored the huge variety of seeds and had fun seeing which ones we could identify. In the future we are hoping to get support to build a shade house for seed raising, so that we can be part of the full cycle from seed to table gathering seeds from our own plants to sow again for the following year.
Over in our tyre gardens, we planted native plants that we got through the school’s Paper4Trees programme. To give them and our fruit trees the best start, we gave them a really good layer of mulch thanks to the team at Evelyn Tree Services, who generously supplied it for us.
One of the highlights of the term has been snacking straight from the garden—we loved picking fresh cauliflower and broccoli right off the plants, and we gathered a great harvest of kale too. We have had some very healthy parsley harvests, with our gardeners taking bunches of them home for their families to add to meals.
Our soil and plants have been getting plenty of attention as well. The worm farm needed a bit of love since the worms weren't huge fans of the cold, so we topped it up with fresh scraps to get them happy and active again. We direct sowed rows of carrots and radishes, so now we wait to see how they pop up. We also got our sprouted potatoes into a garden bed, and with any luck, they’ll be ready to dig up right before we break up for summer. Our kumara are currently sitting in a tub of sandy soil until the tipu start to grow, and then we’ll get them planted out for an early autumn harvest.
When Maeve came back to the gardens, she was thrilled to see our pea garden thriving. The pea plants are now tall enough to start climbing up the willow supports we wove for them back in Term 2. The strawberry patch was getting pretty overrun with weeds, so we spent some time clearing those out, giving the soil a good feed, and tucking the plants back under their wool mulch mats so they’re ready for the warmer weather ahead.
Our compost is building up nicely like a giant layer cake of carbon and nitrogen, or browns and greens. It’s not quite ready to use yet, so for now, we just keep feeding and watering it. Even though it's been chilly, we haven't had a massive amount of rain, so our young gardeners have been great at keeping all the plots regularly watered.
Looking ahead to next term, we plan to set up a tub of seaweed tonic so we can brew our own organic liquid feed to keep everything growing strong through summer.
