MMI School Gardens - Term 1 2025
This year we have welcomed a whole new crew to the gardens at MMI to work with our remaining year 8 gardeners who are showing them the ropes. We spent some time re-allocating and preparing garden beds for our new gardeners. Luckily our compost bays provided lots of amazing organic compost for topping up the beds. Our worm bins were toppled over the holidays, but we have them up and running again, and fed by waste from the school ‘foods room’ and coffee husks from the local roasters which are already producing some good castings.
At the start of the term the garden was full of beautiful giant sunflowers, which proved to be a great attraction for the bees and later provided the opportunity for seed saving for next year. The stalks didn’t go to waste either. We sawed them off at the base and chopped the heads off them, then left them to dry and strengthen in the shed. They will make perfect home grown stakes for supporting our peas!
We also had a great crop of strawberry popping corn. However, we had mixed results this year with using it to make popcorn. We have come to the conclusion that it needs to be super dry and spiky for it to be successful. Luckily we had stored some cobs from last year’s harvest, so everyone got to at least taste some!
Our butternut squash was plentiful too, and after letting it season for a few weeks, we steamed it and blitzed it with some good dark chocolate to make delicious butternut squash chocolate mousse! It didn’t last long! Some of our gardeners even took squash home to make it for their families for Easter as they told me their parents had been telling them about the high cost of Easter Eggs this year! What an awesome alternative! They have plans to add some orange rind to the mix, to vary the flavours! I love the interest some of our gardeners have in taste combinations. I’m sure there are some budding chefs among them!
We have a couple of interesting projects on the go this term too. The first is a community collaboration with Tauranga Food Bank, who have approached us about sowing seedlings for them. We spent a morning ‘pricking out’ our seedlings to produce dozens of baby seedlings. We will allocate a spot in our gardens to grow these greens which will be distributed to families in need.
The leafcutter beehive was a slow starter (we may have been a bit too eager to get it going before the weather was hot enough?) but we now see them busy pollinating the gardens alongside the native bees, honey bees and bumblebees, which bring a wonderful biodiversity to our space.
The Monarch butterflies love our space too, with the Mexican sunflowers proving a hot favourite! Our swan plants are now laden down with fat caterpillars and we have even built a mini butterfly house to where we transfer chrysalises, to allow the butterflies to emerge without the danger of becoming lunch for the birds! This year we are taking part in the NZ Monarch Butterfly Tagging Programme and tagged our first butterfly last week! This citizen science project involves entering tag details on the website, so that if it is found elsewhere, we can learn more about the monarchs’ flight paths and overwintering sites.
As well as all of this excitement, we are continuing with the usual pattern of weeding, feeding and maintaining a regular cycle of planting and sowing seeds, so that our gardens continue to thrive. It is a full programme, but one which the students are showing a great passion for. It is inspiring to see the joy that the next generation gains from spending this precious time in nature.
