Water!

The new challenge facing us is watering our garden over the summer. The nearest tap is quite a walk away for little children with heavy buckets of water so we are looking at getting a barrel connected to the rooftop and collecting rainwater for our garden.

Unexpected results!

We did not anticipate people asking if they could buy our produce! We sold some broccoli, parsley, spinach and spring onions to the Zumba ladies and a big bunch of kale to an RTLB visitor to the school - gold coin donations! We think we will put the money to the new summer planting! It is great to be able to share our produce and know that it is organic and healthy! I feel we have made a difference not only with our children but also the people who see our garden and think perhaps they might be able to grow something as well?

Snippets of student conversation

Some valuable snippets that were overheard today.

Samantha: What are you eating Mrs D?

Me: This is kale. Here, try some.

Lousianna: May I have some too?

Later on-

Samantha and Louisianna: We went and got some more kale to eat. We even gave some of the kale to Madison.

Madison: Yes. I put it in my wrap. It was delicious.

In addition to this, we had around 70 students devouring the spinach dip made by one class. When the bread and crackers ran out, they used whatever they had in their lunch boxes to polish up all the remaining dip. And, we have already had spinach smoothies. 

Vegetables are definitely the 'in' thing!!

Here are the children from one of the classes enjoying the dip. I'm sure more photos will follow.

First day of term 4

Term 4 has begun with a bang! The children were really excited and amazed to see how much the vegetables had grown and wanted to know if we could go and harvest straight away. Catherine experimented with having a give away table for excess grapefruit from home and they were all gone. So that was a success. We even have an enquiry if we would like to sell our parsley by the ladies that use our school hall twice a week for their zumba class. So, it looks like we will be organising parsley bundles soon.

Garden journey!

At first, I was a little apprehensive about doing gardening this past term! Having not much experience at all! However over the past term I have learnt soooo much along with my class about how to take care of the garden. We have loved so much watching it grow and tending to the needs of certain plants. I cannot get over how amazing it all looks and am so excited to get cracking on the cooking this term! First, spinach dip! Have looked up lots of recipes and should be amazing.

My own personal goal is to get the families as involved as I can and try and increase enthusiasm for gardening at home! I also can't wait to share the vegetables with the rest of the community as we look at next year.

New Challenges

Our vegetable gardens are looking amazing! This is inspite of the stormy Auckland weather over the past week. But this has brought in the forefront some more challenges for us. Vegetables do not follow school term times. So we have been faced with some vegetables ready for harvesting in the holidays. These will go to seed if we wait. We are having to harvest these vegetables, although ideally we would have liked the students to be part of the harvesting. The next challenge is going to be using all the produce. We are debating how we are going to set deal with this-- maybe send some vegetables home with the students or set up a swap table of some sort. Hmmm!! Lots to think about and next term is a short term!!