Orchard

This is what our garden looked like when we started the challenge.

We had six established raised beds, four garden beds and an orchard with young fruit trees.

Six raised beds

Four garden beds

Plot for new raised beds

We plan to extend the garden by adding five new raised beds to the area leading into the existing garden. We will use our recycled tyres from an old playground to do some container planting and we are going to make a bed behind the existing raised beds on the school fence line to plant tomatoes, beans and cucumbers. We are taking a vote with the classes to determine what they would like to see planted in the tyres and we have asked for some garden designs from Room 8 which are looking fantastic!!

Planned tomato bed along fence line

  

Patumahoe School children at Mitre10 receiving all the lovely goods from Tui and Mitre 10 for the school garden challenge. Thank you Tui and Mitre 10!!!!

  

Patumahoe Primary School’s budding kitchen gardeners

Welcome to our school garden blog where we will share learning and fun experiences from Patumahoe Primary school's garden and cooking classes.  To develop our garden, we will be using mainly recycled materials, growing our own seedlings, accepting donations of materials and running our own school market stall to fund the garden and kitchen.  We have a tight budget!  Our thanks go to our school PTA, which has kindly contributed funds to purchase our raised garden beds.

We are also enthusiastically competing in the Tui School Garden Challenge!  Thank you to Mitre 10 Mega and Tui who have provided us with gardening materials.

Six classes from years 1 to 4 are involved in our school garden project.  Each class spends time in the garden and kitchen once a fortnight.  Half work in the vegetable garden and the other half prepare food in the school hall for the whole class to share at the end of the session.  To be able to do this, each class has five parent helpers and the classroom teacher present.

We hope to share with our children the sheer joy of a daily wander around the garden checking up on plants that have become so familiar they are like old friends.  We hope they will also celebrate as a new leaf, flower or fruit arrives on one of their plants, or as the first pea tendril curls around its support.

The vegetable garden is the backbone of our entire project – every cooking class begins with a trip to the veggie garden to pick ingredients, so our children learn to cook using the freshest of seasonal ingredients and they learn to enjoy the flavour of tasty, just-picked food.

We plan to expand the gardens using as many recycled materials as we can. We will use an old school fence to construct the compost heap, old playground tyres will be lined and used for potatoes, flax flowers will be formed into pea tripods and old pallets will form an insect hotel habitat for beneficial insects.