Hot House

Our garden is really thriving at the moment and we are seeing the fruits of all the children's hard work coming out of the ground or from the plants.  On Friday afternoons we sell some of our produce to parents who are picking up their children from school.  Last week we had potatoes, rhubarb, onions and capsicums on sale. Before the sale the children are involved in harvesting the crops, weighing out the potatoes into 2kg bags, tying groups of onions together and grouping and tying rhubarb sticks together. The strawberries never get to go on sale as they get eaten straight off the plants.

Huge thanks to Brian at CanCERN who organised the Hot House for our garden.  Later this year we will be able to start our plants early undercover and grow our vegetables from seeds.

Six Foot Beans

Our broad beans are now over 6 feet tall and producing lots of beans for us to eat.  We harvest them every week and take them home for tea.

In the foreground you can see some of our other vegetables; carrots, parsnips, beetroot, onions and celery. You can also see one our leeks that has gone to seed so we can collect seeds from it to plant in our gardens next year.

Last day for Tui

This week a lot of people have been helping in the garden as the plants are growing very fast.  The potatoes keep on coming and sprouting up in theirs rows.  We have been putting our own compost onto the rows so that the plants are protected from the frost.  We have very nearly emptied both of the big compost heaps, but have two small ones to go.

As you can see from the pictures below we have lots of vegetables on the go and our gardens are going to be very fruitful this year.

We have three major recycling programmes on the go at moment, our fruit scraps which we collected every Friday and feed to the worms, all our garden waste which goes into the compost bins, and finally our plants that we have let go to seed so we can collect the seeds and use them next season. (Ryan)

Another fantastic Friday afternoon

This afternoon we have weeded, thinned, planted and composted. Our garden is starting to really thrive as the warmer weather starts to arrive. Today we planted rows of peas and beans and ate some of the thinnings from the radishes. Our garden is looking great.

We took buckets of compost from the heaps for our potatoes that are poking through. It is amazing how worms can turn all our garden waste into soil for us to use again.

New Term plantings

Today was a nice sunny day for planting.  In the morning Ryan, Sage and Josh planted cucumbers in the raised garden.  First they dug 9 holes then put a little bit of fertiliser in the bottom of each hole, some water into each, before putting the plants into hole. To finish off they covered the remaining part of the holes with dirt.  At morning tea time Paityn, Saffron and Ryan planted spring onions and onions using the same procedure as the cucumbers.  At lunchtime Paityn and Saffron planted silver beet seedlings in our other garden outside Room 16. Other children helped to pull out some of the weeds that had grown over the holidays.  All these plants have been grown from seed this year. (By Paityn, Saffron and Ryan).

Going to seed

This year we are letting some of our plants "go to seed".  We are allowing some of our silver beet, leeks and kale go through the cycle of creating flowers and seeds.  We will harvest the seeds once they are ready and dry them out ready to use again next season. This will allow us to complete another cycle in the garden, just like our composting and fruit recycling processes that we do all the time.

A few years ago we let some of the silverbeet plants go to seed and they produced huge amounts of seeds that we have been able to use and we have had lots of random silverbeet plants growing throughout the garden. Our silverbeet and leeks this year will be coming from seeds harvested earlier in the year.

Potatoes and Pumpkins

This week we have planted two types of potatoes, Red Rascels and Agria, in four rows in two different places in our garden. We dug out the soil to make a trench. We sprinkled the bottom of the trench with potato fertilizer and then filled it with organic compost.  We placed the potatoes into compost and covered them over with another bag of compost. Then we raked some soil over the top.

Today we planted pumpkin seeds into garden, by digging a hole in the ground, filling it with Tui seed raising mix and planting 2 seeds in each place.  We have marked each area with a stick.  Then we raked over the area to make it neat.

Last season we had 75 pumpkins so hopefully we will get that many again this year.  By Ryan.

Runner beans

Today we planted 3 types of climbing beans under the frame that we built for them to grow up. We left one section free to plant once the other beans have grown, so we get beans at different times. By Ryan

Parsnip Pie

Today we (Paityn, Paris and Taylor Rm20) made parsnip pie.

Method:
Peel parsnips and cut into thin slices
Fry parsnips until they change colour, without burning them
Slice tomatoes thinly
Grate cheese - approx 2 cups

Butter baking dish
Layer alternate layers of parsnip, tomato and grated cheese until baking dish is full.
Sprinkle brown sugar, black pepper and salt on cheese layers

Flatten down and pour in 100ml of cream

Cover with layer of breadcrumps

Bake in hot oven (180C) for 40 minutes

Allow to cool and serve.

Ingredients:

6 - 8 parsnips
3 tomatoes
Cheese
Black Pepper
Salt
Brown sugar
Oil for cooking parsnips
Cream
Bread Crumbs

Silver beet and Mushroom Pie with Cheese Sauce

Today we made silver beet and mushroom pie, with cheese sauce and nutmeg, using silver beet from our school garden.

We collected a lot of silver beet from the garden and then took it back to the kitchen where we took the greenery off the stalks, washed it and broke it up. We boiled this in a large pot on the stove.  While this was being done we grated the cheese for the cheese sauce that was being prepared at the same time. All the silver beet scraps were recycled into the worm farms.  While the silver beet was boiling on the stove we prepared the mushrooms by taking the stalks off and washing them.

Once we had drained the silver beet we layered it into a baking dish, and filled the dish with circles of mushrooms.  Then we poured on the cheese sauce, along with more grated cheese and pinches of nutmeg.

Then we popped it all into the oven to grill for 20 minutes until the cheese was melted and had turned brown.

By Morgan, Aaliyah, Sade and Brenna (Rooms 20 and 21)

Ingredients

Silver beet leaves (Lots of)
Mushrooms to cover

Cheese Sauce:
Cheese
Butter
Flour
Nutmeg