In the Garden at Tahatai - Term 4
The term started with a focus on the orchard. The trees had been very optimistically reaching for the sky and needed a drastic prune to keep them under control. After a good trim, sunlight and air can now pass through them preventing fungal disease, while also allowing fruit to ripen well. With a couple of metres off the top of some, the harvest will now also be within reach once they start fruiting again. Some are slower than others to take off, but our apples are already fruiting well and looking promising for the season ahead. Our youngest gardeners have been keeping a close eye on the baby apples, and are learning that although the blossoms and the tiny fruit look very tempting to pick, patience will mean juicy apples next term. Our new cherry guava trees are small, but looking healthy, so maybe in a few seasons, we can add handfuls of those to the kai cart too! The citrus is recovering from sooty mold and we are hoping that next season will see another bumper crop!
The garden beds were a mass of green leaves at the start of term, with silverbeet and brassica taking centre stage. The kai growers enjoyed chomping on purple sprouting broccoli pops as they worked in the gardens and the kai cart was full of silverbeet and spinach for those who were quick at pick up time on Thursdays!
A chilly start to the term meant some slow progress in the shadehouse, so our seedlings were not the most successful. Thankfully we could borrow from Mount Maunganui Intermediate as their PIPS gardeners had some more success with growing there. Our gardeners enjoy knowing that their seeds and seedlings are swapped and shared with other schools,
The seaweed tonic and worm wees that our gardens produce have been amazing sources of organic fertilizer for our garden beds. Our rhubarb has seen epic growth as it’s the closest one to the worm bins, which means a short trip with a heavy watering can! We have also started an in-ground worm bin, to see how well it works. The idea is that we just feed the worms in a perforated bucket sunk directly into the garden bed and the rest is automatic. No need to dig out worm castings, as the worms wander in and out through the holes in the bucket and fertilize and aerate the gardens as they go!
Our herb garden has been providing well, with parsley, mint and catnip (for our gardeners’ pets) being the favourites. We are planting eternal spring onions too.. with bulbs which we rescued from food waste that had been destined for the worm bins. We can just snip off the green tops, leaving the white bulbs in the soil to keep producing! Our worm bins have given us pumpkin seedlings too! Although they look a bit leggy as they had been striving to reach the light, we have planted them and will see how they go! They should make the perfect ground cover below our corn crops over the summer months.
Ms Hunt’s raspberry canes, which we thought hadn’t quite survived, have come back with great gusto and we are looking forward to having raspberries as well as strawberries in our berry patch next year. The poppy seeds we saved from last year’s flowerheads shot up again this year producing teacup sized frilly pink flowers for the bees to bury themselves in! We had so many seeds last year that we shared them with the other schools, and now Arataki School and Mount Intermediate are also growing Tahatai Coast poppies! We have saved this year’s seedheads again and would love to be able to share some seeds with our school community too in the kai carts next year.
Our youngest kai growers love taking a ramble through the orchard with Maeve, learning about edible flowers and companion planting under the trees. They munch on broccoli and mint and plant a seed in a pot, but the highlight is always the worm bin! They enjoy digging to see what their favourite food is and checking to see if they can spot the ones with the most stripes. The sprinkler in the shadehouse is also a welcome surprise on the hot days!
Our newly renovated garden space has come into its own this term. It’s been wonderful to have a shady spot where we can work on the hot days and space to shelter from the showers too! Mr Greg has even hunted out a bright picnic table for us to use for activities, which has been super helpful. Last week, we gathered around it to learn about bumblebees. Thanks to the NZ Bumblebee Conservation Trust, our gardeners got summer activity packs to take home for the quiet days in the holidays. We learned about pollination through an activity where the gardeners made paper finger puppet bees and dipped into honey and ‘flowers’ with ‘pollen’ sprinkles, to see how the bees take pollen from one flower to another.
The butterflies are already visiting our swanplants to lay their eggs, and we are hoping to take part in the Monarch Butterfly tagging programme again next year. We will cover them with a big mosquito net to protect the chrysalises from the birds and then gently tag them with numbered stickers and upload the data to the website. Then their flightpaths can be followed, so that we can learn more about monarchs in NZ.
We have done lots of planting, the kumara is in, the beds of corn, pumpkin and sunflowers should thrive and we have started some little gourds, which we hope will climb up our pallet supports and hang off the fences. If we have enough gourds to harvest, we can dry them and use them to make bird feeders and decorate our gardens.
Thanks to funding from Tauranga City Council, our rainwater harvesting system has been working well, collecting water for all of our lower garden beds. This takes the load off the school bore, as the water we can use from there is limited. Our young gardeners learn how the rainwater collection works, following it through from the roof of Mr Greg’s shed, to the tanks, to the drips from the hose that keep their veggies watered. They have even decorated a sign to explain the system to school visitors from the community.
