Term 4 2024 – Here Comes Summer!
This year we were lucky enough to be asked to join the BOP garden and arts festival. Along with Arataki school we are the first schools to be part of this big event, an exciting opportunity to show off what we have created at Te Manawa o Papamoa in less than two years!
We had a lot of mahi to do in the lead up to the event, we had the last of the winter crops to pull out including broccoli, leeks, peas and broad beans the latter of which Takitimu made into a delicious dip with their teacher. Towards the end of term 3 we had began sowing our summer vegetable seeds keeping them nice and warm in the greenhouse as we waited for the outside weather and soil to become warm enough to plant into. We now have plenty of summer veg planted out in the garden such as; zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, basil, pumpkin, kamokamo, gourd, corn, lettuce, main crop potatoes and even two watermelon and a crown pumpkin planted out in the food forest as a ground cover.
We are so grateful to Whaea Swan who worked diligently with many classes to make art for the gardens in time for the festival, now each bed is numbered which will make it easier for planning and tracking our planting, and we have beautiful signs labelling many of our plants. Visitors to our gardens were delighted with the recycled owl art decorating the compost bays and the clever wire critter sculptures scattered around the garden space. Though we didn’t get as many visitors to our gardens as we had hoped, we did get plenty of positive feedback and encouragement from those who did.
We had a great time digging for new potatoes and were thrilled with how many we harvested. Takitimu practiced their maths weighing out exactly 1kg of potatoes each which they got to take home and the rest were given to Te Arawa to cook on a fire as part of their end of term activity.
Other activities we have done this term include trying loquat fruit and planting the seeds to see if we can grow our own, making lemonade (so refreshing on those hot days!), planting out swan plant seeds and mulching our gardens and of course lots of watering!
