Spring

It was quiet in the garden last week. We were mainly weeding the gardens and pulling out silverbeet plants. We are going to plant many spring plants, including oregano, capsicum, radicchio, squash and cabbage as well as marigold, phlox and celosia flowers. Our potatoes are growing well and are already quite tall.

Amber V.

News from the Gardening Group

In the garden over the holiday, all of the plants have grown huge. Our spinach is nearly as tall as me! We had to spend some time clearing up and pulling out the plants which were finished. We filled a whole bin really fast.
We’ve taken a lot of vegetables home last term like spinach, silver beet, capsicum, lettuce, bok choy, spring onions, butter beans and sugar snap peas. After cleaning up the garden, we took home cauliflower, celery, lettuce and carrots. I took the largest one. I didn’t even know carrots grew that big! We still have spring onions, celery and spinach to harvest, too. You should eat 5+ a day to stay healthy.
Now the garden has some space, Mr Deed is going to show us how to plant and care for strawberries. Strawberries are so yum. Soon, we are also going to be planting some potatoes. We are going to stack the potatoes high up.
You should join the Gardening group. It is really fun and it’s the only time to get dirty and messy at breaks.  You get a Gardening Journal to colour things in and keep track of what you have grown, what you have harvested and what else you could to grow.

Stay healthy and be healthy,
Nandani Kumar, Year 4

Harvest!

Well we have had some fun in the garden lately! After the holiday our garden had grown so much! We have been enjoying cabbage, cauliflower, lettuce, bok choy, spinach, silverbeet and radishes for the last few weeks.
Some of our gardeners made this info page for you to read about our radishes. I absolutely love to see the kids so into their veggies and being so proud of their very own garden.

The PCS gardeners have also been busy planting as once the cabbage and cauliflowers were harvested our garden suddenly looked very bare! The kids really love seeing these tiny seedlings grow into beautiful plants which they are able to take home and share with their families.

Water- Our Precious Resource

When it comes to saving water, a little change in lifestyle can make a big impact.

Tips for Saving Water in the Home:

• Turn the tap off after you wet your toothbrush
• Rinse your razor in the sink rather than the running tap
• When washing dishes by hand, fill a sink rather than letting the tap run
• Take showers instead of bath (and even takes shorter showers!)
• Only run the dishwasher and washing machine when they are full
• Run a sink to rinse vegetables instead of leaving the tap on.

Tips for Saving Water in the Garden:

• Keep an eye out for leaky taps- including hoses and pipes
• When the kids want to cool off, run the sprinkler on a dry patch of lawn
• Avoid outdoor water toys that require constant water flow
• Use an outside broom to sweep the yard or patio instead of the hose
• Water dry spots by hand instead of running a sprinkler system
• Leave the lawn clippings on the grass to keep moisture in and the ground cooler

There's a a great website called Water Use it Wisely full of practical ideas on how to be more water aware.
http://wateruseitwisely.com/100-ways-to-conserve/

Lovely Lettuce

More ideas from the Gardening Group. This time Amber Le and Jenny have used the iPads to tell us all about gourmet lettuce.

Thanks, girls! We are going to pick some of these lovely lettuces when we head out to the garden tomorrow afternoon.

Spotlight on Silverbeet

Thanks Jade and Inaya for sharing about silverbeet. It's great to know that our extended PCS family (Jade's rabbits) are also enjoying vegies from our garden.

Silverbeet is really easy to grow. It is ready is eat at around 6 weeks after planting and grow in almost any soil type.

Silverbeet is fab because it is  a cut and come again plant, which means if you are careful when you harvest, you can continue to harvest for an entire season, if not more. If it does start to flower you just cut it right back to the base and usually it will recover and sprout again.

You can eat the dark green glossy leaves or the wide cream stalks. They are really tasty just lightly cooked in a saucepan with the just the water on them from washing and a little butter. If you add silverbeet to cooked potatoes in a hot frying pan and add lightly beaten eggs, you can make a tasty frittata.

March Miracles!

Well our autumn planting has been completed for a few of our beds. We planted the seedlings in at the end of February and have faithfully been watering them and watching them grow.

We are learning so much about how to look after seedlings like how to plant them correctly and look after them once they are in the ground. We have seen for ourselves how they start off so small and grow so quickly. We even discovered that they take up quite a bit more space than we had anticipated!

The weather here in Auckland has been beautifully warm and as a result our garden is pumping. Here is a pic of what this same bed looked like just four weeks after we initially planted it.

Which meant that last week we were able to harvest some silverbeet and some of our gourmet lettuce! Here we are getting our (biodegradable) plastic bags filled up with our first lot of goodies to take home.

Today, our gardeners were discussing how they had enjoyed the lettuce at home in sandwiches, salads and even burgers! It is so great that this is something the kids have done themselves and are able to share with their families at home.

If you would like to see more of what we have been up to, you can visit ImageShack on this link to see more pictures.ImageShack Our gardens in March