Tahatai Kai Growers Term 1, 2025
In the first week of term our orchard harvest began - the trees were laden with apples - a couple of red varieties and a golden delicious. For the first few weeks of term we had a full kai cart every Thursday! The kai growers picked apples and pears, made paper bags from newspapers and left them at the gate at the end of the day, to share with our school whanau. They went home with full bellies too and some of the apples were saved for school lunches. The worms even got lucky, with our worm farmers gathering buckets of rotten windfalls to add to the worm bins.
Another exciting harvest was our first rockmelon - needless to say, it didn’t last long!
The hot summer made conditions perfect for seed saving. The students gathered marigold seeds from the plants and we saved seed from the seed heads we had hanging in the garden shed - poppyseed, kale, broccoli and sunflower. We have popped them into envelopes and will use them next season to plant out our gardens.
One huge addition to the gardens for us this term is the shade house we had built thanks to funding from PiPS. We now have a safe place to start our seedlings, with timed irrigation and a lock on the door to ensure they are not meddled with at weekends and over school holidays. The shade house was a huge hit with the kids on the hottest days too, as they had a quick boogie under the sprinklers! It is now packed full with trays of mini seedlings, busy growing from week to week, to keep us going with a constant supply for our garden beds. We are also working to support the community food bank, by growing a supply of seedlings which will be planted and harvested by the Omanu Community Gardeners.
Our new shed is working well and we now have the addition of a louvred pergola, to create a dry and shady outdoor workspace to allow us to use the gardens whatever the weather. Our gardens are nicely fenced off too, to mark out this special area.
We have been busy planting out seedlings. The beans and peas are in - planted next to bamboo tipis in the garden beds. The strawberries have been thinned out and runners re-planted, to allow them time to get strong for next summer.
We are taking part in an interesting project this term too. It’s a citizen science project, which involves learning about Monarch butterflies and their life cycles.
As part of the project we are tagging monarch butterflies and uploading data to the Monarch Butterfly Tagging Programme website, so that we can add to the current knowledge about their flight paths and overwintering sites. We have already successfully tagged six monarch butterflies at Tahatai Coast and supported many more through the vulnerable stages of their development.
The gardeners have shown a huge passion for this project, with one gardener even doing her own research at home, taking notes and bringing them in to share with the class!
They have invested a lot of energy into netting off areas around swan plants and finding and relocating chrysalises to safer spots where they won’t be damaged or eaten by birds. One of our young gardeners has even told us about a possible overwintering site nearby, which we plan to investigate next term. If it is still in use this winter, we will be able to report our findings to ‘inaturalist’ and get the site tagged on their online map. So exciting!!
Another highlight this term was harvesting butternut squash and making butternut squash chocolate mousse together in the hall kitchen. We then left little tubs of mousse to set in the fridge and a few hours later demolished them at the garden shed! Some have promised they will try the recipe with their families at Easter.
Aside from all this excitement, we also spend our days watering, weeding and feeding, to maintain our garden beds. We are planting out seedlings and learning about organic pest control methods, such as making slug and wasp traps and using mulch, mulch mats and copper tape to keep snails at bay. On the last day of term, the students brought home bags of silverbeet, spinach and herbs to share with their families