Term 3 2025
Term 3 in the māra kai at Te Manawa o Papamoa has been full of preparation, planting, and looking after our food forest. Even though the weather has still been cool, we’ve been busy getting everything ready for the warmer months ahead.
Our citrus and avocado trees have had lots of care — we weeded around them, gave them a good feed of fertilizer, plenty of water, and tucked them in with mulch. Around the avocados we also planted comfrey roots, which will help improve the soil, feed the trees and provide a living mulch. In the food forest, we kept weeds down with cardboard and mulch, planted native seedlings, and transplanted alpine strawberries that will spread as a tasty ground cover.
We’ve been busy sowing seeds too! The tamariki loved making their own newspaper pots and planted summer seeds such as green beans, zucchini, pumpkin, basil, tomatoes, peas, and flowers. These are growing in our greenhouse getting ready for when it is warm enough to be planted outside. While we are waiting for the soil to warm up we have prepped many of the garden beds by topping them up with compost, covering with silage (as a mulch) and covering with shadecloth which allows for the rain to get in and the soil to breath, but won’t let the silage to be blown away or the soil to dry out in the strong spring winds! During Te Wiki o te Reo Māori (Māori language week), we made signs for these resting garden beds explaining that these beds are taking a break and building up strength in preparation for the busy growing season ahead.
Takitimu learnt about how we can grow more kumara from saving a few kumara that they harvested earlier in the year. We called the saved kumara the ‘mother’ and very carefully planted her in pots of pumice and a little bit of compost. We keep her in the greenhouse where she grows tipu (seedling sprouts), when these have long and strong roots and the soil outside is warm we will carefully peel off the tipu and plant them into the ground. This will be the 2nd year of growing kumara from the kumara we grew and saved!
This term we have had plenty of yummy salad greens to harvest and take home. We gave the herb garden a tidy-up with some pruning, and tamariki got to take bunches of fresh herbs home. We also pruned back the tea garden and warmed up with delicious cups of herbal tea with some fresh leaves straight from the garden, and some dried flowers from previous harvests.
Ngā mihi to all the tamariki for their mahi this term. The gardens are looking great and are nearly ready for summer!
