After the summer break, the garden at Suzanne Aubert Catholic School looked just as pretty as when we left it before the school holidays. The community came during the holidays and helped themselves to tomatoes, courgettes, and corn.

We started collecting seeds from flowers and vegetables that had run their course. The kids enjoyed picking sunflower seeds out of the flowerheads. We then packed them up in little sachets, named them, and stored them until next spring season when we will plant them again. It's great for the children to learn that if they save the seeds, they can plant even more plants without any cost.

Alongside our other schools, we received all the equipment to set up our sentinel garden, supported by Tauranga Moana Biosecurity. Mike from Te Puke Landscape Supply brought fresh soil, and the kids had great fun giving him a hand shovelling the soil off the truck.

The STEM kids are responsible for looking after the sentinel garden, and they created a slideshow to explain it all to the other year levels, which has been awesome. Lisa from Kiwifruit Vine Health came as a guest speaker and explained to the kids why it's important to detect unwanted bugs found on specific plants planted in the sentinel garden. From now on, they will be “bug detectives”.

Our focus is on looking after our monarch butterflies. We found plenty of hungry caterpillars, which was great to see since we planted the swan plants just last year. It's a great success as the school has just been established, and we can see more and more beneficial insects starting to appear.

Watch our new space in Term Two where we will be creating a butterfly garden.

A great way to finish Term One is always a cooking session where the kids are eagerly waiting. We made homemade herb breadsticks with a herb dip using freshly picked herbs from our school garden. The ingredients are simple, but the herbs added a punch of flavour. The kids loved it and shared it happily with their teachers for morning tea.

From Nina