In the garden at MMI - Term 4

The gardens have been the usual hive of activity at Mount Intermediate this term.  Although the weather was a bit unsettled, the wet days provided a boost to the gardens and with a few warm weeks, they are now flourishing.  

We have worked hard on maintaining a turnover of seedlings, so that we can keep the gardens productive.  Although we have an irrigated shadehouse, the cooler start to the term made this challenging.  Brendon, the school property manager and all round handyman came to the rescue!  He had some salvaged laserlite panels in his shed, which he has attached to the lower part of the shadehouse, to bump up the temperature and keep our seedlings happy.  We have left a gap below the roof, to prevent it from overheating.  Brendon also added some more shelving, giving the place a total makeover!  It seems to be working well.  

Our swanplants have already attracted lots of early monarch butterfly visitors and our first wave of chrysalises appeared a month or so before the end of term.  In an effort to protect them from hungry birds, we built a mini butterfly house from a wooden beercrate and a net curtain, with a small opening for them to fly out.  It did the trick, and the butterflies started life in our wildflower garden, feasting on sweetpeas, marigolds, snapdragons, poppies, marshmallows and daisies!  The wildflower garden is a mass of colour and is attracting lots of interesting looking native bees too!

The tomato experiment has proven interesting.  We planted tomatoes, quite early - well ahead of labour day.  One plant under a perspex mini glasshouse and the other just straight into the garden bed.  Both have thrived.  But the one under cover grew far more quickly, hitting about 3 times the size of the other in the same growth period.  The tomatoes are already large, healthy and green, waiting for more sunshine to turn them red!  

Every Wednesday morning the first stop is the strawberry patch.  The plants are thriving and there is so much green in and around them that picking strawberries is like a treasure hunt!  But with a tasty reward!

Our artistic gardener Violet has decorated some of our dried bottle gourds and painted them with eyes, in an effort to keep the birds from pecking at the berries, but I think the problem is that our berries are just too tasty!!

Our leeks and elephant garlic were ready for harvesting just before term finished.  Both proved a great success!  We have swapped them out for pumpkin, beans and corn, which will thrive through the hot months and hopefully provide a good harvest at the end of term 1 next year.  

The seaweed tonic that we brewed up in a wheelie bin is churning out litres and litres of organic liquid feed.  The rhubarb is visibly appreciative, providing us with giant pink stalks of deliciousness to take home and stew up for desserts and breakfast bowls.  Our cold frame was a great success for the lettuces for school lunches too, and is now resting, covered in sweet silage, to prepare it for next term.  We will try some more heat tolerant varieties next term and might have to retire the cold frame for a few months so that we don’t fry them!

The potatoes are out!  What a harvest - some lovely new spuds for the barbecue season!  And, the kumara is in.  We built little volcanoes to plant our tipu in, and then surrounded them with a bed of silage, to keep them from drying out over the summer.  They will be quietly growing while we are all enjoying the summer and hopefully we will have another good morning of digging for treasure once they are ready to go!

We have had a very dedicated crew of gardeners this year, with lots of our last 2024 year sevens having stayed on this year.  They have been following the patterns of the seasons and know what to expect and what to plant from week to week.  Our year eights had a recent visit to the Mount College gardens to see what lies ahead for those who are keen to follow through.  It’s exciting to see the pathway, and to know that some of our earliest PIPS gardeners have graduated with their horticulture certificates, ready to hit the ground running once they leave school.  We’re looking forward to meeting our new year sevens in 2026!  Our returning gardeners will be happy to show them around.