15 August 2019: Creating Potted Colour

Over the last few weeks, Gardening Club has focussed on creating color in our school with plants.  

The Shade House had a lovely donation of bulbs from the community and the tamariki planted these in pots around the school. The children loved finding worms in the soil and guessing what flowers will bloom. We also learnt how our worm poo from our school worm farms will benefit the growth of our plants. The tamarki decided gloves were a good option for this part of the process! 

We also worked together as a team to reinvigorate and replant Christine's pots outside of the school office. The tamariki ensured that each pot had three different flower colours and that their planting was even across the top of the pots. The new pots look fabulous and so vibrant, well done Gardening Club! 

7 June 2019: Creating play spaces using plants

This week, our school was donated some trees and shrubs in recognition of our paper and cardboard recycling efforts in 2018. This is part of the national 'Paper4trees Programme' which aims to minimise waste in schools.

At gardening club, the tamariki helped plant these trees and shrubs, including lemonwood trees and different species of hebe.  

The gardeners worked together to remove the plants from their pots, place them in holes and gently surround the roots with soil.  A highlight for the tamariki was finding and identifying creatures in the wheelbarrow full of soil. 

We focussed our planting efforts on 'Dylan's garden' near the Rawhiti classroom and in and around the Rawhiti play area.  Once our plants are established into a hedge we hope to have created a secret passageway to explore. It was fabulous to see the children's excitement and enthusiasm for creating a new play area using plants and helping to make our school beautiful.  Ka pai gardeners! 

 

16 May 2019: Creating markers for our vegetable garden

Today our children painted rocks to create garden markers. They look fabulous!

Some children designed their rocks to look like the vegetables and herbs we have planted. Others used their creative flair to make their own original rock designs. These labels will help our tamarki identify the various vegetables and herbs they have planted around our beautiful school.  Ka rawe!

23 May 2019: Nurturing our shade house plants and an after school vege sale

Today our gardening club were busy tending to our plants in our school shade house.  There is much work to be done to keep the plants maintained, so that they are ready for sale when we fundraise for our school.  Our focus today was on some of our grasses that needed to be pruned and re-potted. The tamarki especially loved getting their gloves deep into the soil and re-potting the root-bound plants into bigger pots. We had fun identifying different parts of the plants together and learning how to revitalise the plants so that they can continue to grow beautifully.  

We also had some children harvest some more Autumn vegetables at gardening club.  A wonderful and very enthusiastic group of boys from Tahi did a great job of selling these to families after school, fabulous work!  

02 May: Harvesting our Autumn crops

Today we focussed on harvesting our Autumn crops. 

Rawhiti and Tahi children planted seeds in trays to grow and nurture in their classrooms last term. The seeds included carrots (kāreti), beans (pīni), and beetroot (potae).  Some of our children delicately created their own seed tape out of toilet paper, which we embedded in our vegetable patch behind the shade house. We also planted seedlings including kohlrabi, radishes (rauropi), kale and lettuces (rētehi).

We were excited to discover that our seedlings had thrived over the school holidays. The tamariki had fun discovering how to identify which vegetables were ready to harvest and how to harvest them with care.  Our harvest was so successful we decided to sell our vegetables and herbs to teachers and parents for a Koha so we can fund our next lot of seeds.  Some of the Garden Club children enjoyed their vegetables for dinner!