Lunchtime in the garden!

Check out these keen gardeners! They have been busy weeding as well as harvesting the broccoli and strawberries (straight into their mouths!)

Harvest Time!

Remember when we gave the garden a makeover earlier in the year? Well things have been busy growing and as part of our gardening rotation a few weeks ago, we decided it was time to harvest our vegetables.

It was a fun and busy time pulling up carrots, snipping kale and spinach, cutting cabbages, broccoli and cauliflower.

We gave them as wash (and carefully removed the slugs!). We were so impressed with what we had grown.

Some children took vegetables home but we had so many that we decided we would gift the rest, so Tia delivered them to our local food pantry where they were hopefully made into a delicious dinner.

We have started planting some of the seedlings that we have raised in our greenhouse, and we can't wait for our next harvest in a few months time.

Gardening in the Senior School

On Monday afternoons in the senior syndicate, we are in mixed class groups doing sport/health rotations.

Here we are during our gardening rotation. We are learning about seasons, reading seed packets, soil, how to sow seeds and the germination process.

Check out our hands on learning!

Thanks to our friends at OKE (and our wonderful caretaker Wayne who has built some awesome shelves) our seeds are warm and cosy in our greenhouse and are already starting to sprout! We look forward to our next session when we get into the garden to do some weeding and begin to plant our strawberry patch.

Green Fingers!

Room 8 were excited to pull on gardening gloves and get into the garden last week.

Things had gone a bit crazy in the garden during the school holidays and our mission was to tame the jungle.

There was some great team work as we struggled to pull out some huge plants...

We made some interesting discoveries....

It was great to take our learning outside. We made interesting observations about a range of bugs we came across, discussed the root systems of plants and how weeds impact a garden. We talked about composting and also about turning the soil and letting it rest before we plant some seedlings later this week.

We will keep you updated on our progress.

Grow, cook, EAT

Today Room 8 decided the time was right to harvest some of the vegetables we planted in the garden at the end of last term. 

We picked some snow peas...

cut the broccoli...

and the purple cauliflower...

then picked some leaves from the silver beet and kale plants.

We washed them, chopped them and created a delicious vegetable stir fry.

Some of us predicted that the purple cauliflower would turn white when it was cooked, but it didn't. It kept its beautiful colour.

We appreciated and enjoyed our yummy meal even more, knowing that we grew the plants, harvested the vegetables, prepared, cooked and served them ourselves. 

Ka pai ngā kai, nē?	The food’s lovely, isn’t it?
Āe. He kai reka	Yes. It’s delicious food

We grew kumara!

At the end of last year the children in Room 8 planted kumara plants which we had sprouted from an actual kumara.

You can see that post here http://room8bmps.blogspot.co.nz/2016/09/growing-kumara.html

The plants grew well and at the beginning of  the term we had a dig around to see if there was anything under the ground. It was like digging for treasure!

Look what we found....  😊

 

We grew cabbages!

Last term Room 8 decided to learn more around planting and grew cabbage seedlings in our very own school garden. Yesterday it was time... we finally got the chance to see our perfectly grown cabbages!

While we were taking out our cabbages, the boys also pulled out the bok choy, that happened to be over grown in the garden.

LJ and Jerald had a challenge to try and eat parsley from the garden and said it tasted like rotten orange!

By Savannah ans Melanie

Yay! New plants!

 Room 8 finally updated our indoor classroom garden thanks to Tarita and Adam who did a great job planting these flower seedlings. It's always exciting to have plants growing in our classroom and to notice how they grow and change. We hope to have lots of flowers before the school holidays!