Wednesday 20th August 2014

Blog post by Justine with photo support from Grace B.

Another overcast day in the garden today but that didn't stop us digging for buried treasure.  Today we harvested our crop of potatoes - always a favourite activity for the children.  We dug up over 50 medium to large potatoes and lots of little ones.  Anija and Evie did some great maths working out how many potatoes each garden club member could eat as well as coming up with some good recipe ideas for using the potatoes next week during our cooking session.  Chips and wedges were very popular suggestions.

 Along with our potatoes we also had an excellent crop of worms.  The soil in the potato garden was dark and rich looking and crumbles well between your fingers so it is obviously a good place for worms and good soil for growing vegetables.

 Our final job for the day was to give the play garden a tidy up.  The children pulled out the weeds, added some fresh soil and rearranged the toys so that the garden now looks inviting to play in once again.

6 August 2014

Blog post by Justine

A rather windy day in the garden today but we got a lot achieved.  The garden underneath Mrs Hahn's office window is now planted with lots of flowers which will hopefully give a beautiful display of colour later in the year.

When planting out the seedlings we looked at the estimated height of all the plants and positioned them accordingly in the garden.  Tall plants like stock and

antirrhinum (try saying that fast!) went at the back.  In the middle of the garden we planted statice and polyanthus, and in the front little orange and purple violas.



 

 

The flanders poppy seeds that we planted last week in the little pots have all sprouted.  When they are bigger we will plant them in our ANZAC garden along with the ladybird poppies we planted today.

 

Finally a really big THANK YOU! to everyone who helped, donated and purchased at the mini-market day yesterday.  We made $130.00 which will help us to buy new resources and also give us money towards purchasing a garden shed.  

30 July 2014

Blog post by Justine

Great to have the sun shining today as we got out and gave the raised vege garden beds a much needed weed.  The children enjoyed seeing what had grown over the holidays, what had gone to seed and what was almost ready for harvesting.  Quite a bit of restraint had to be shown so that the potatoes and carrots were not pulled out along with the weeds.

We also filled little paper pots with seed raising mix today and sowed some more Flanders poppy seeds for the garden beside the office.  Hopefully these will germinate in the next two weeks. When the seedlings are big enough we will transplant them in their little paper pots straight into the garden.  The pots will decompose in the soil so there will be no rubbish to get rid of.

Next week on Tuesday the 5th of August we will be having a mini-market day from 2.45- 3.15pm to sell produce from our garden.  If anyone has any fruit, veges or seedlings that they would like to donate for us to sell then please drop them off at the office on Tuesday morning.  We are fundraising to buy resources for garden club and also a garden shed to keep our tools and equipment in. We look forward to seeing all there and we thank you in advance for your support of our garden club!

23 July 2014

Wednesday 23rd July 2014

Blog post by Justine

Welcome back to Garden Club for Term 3!  We are hoping for more settled weather and more opportunities to get out into the garden this term as we have quite a few things planned as we head towards spring.

Some of our plans for this term include:
- Weeding and feeding our existing crops
- Sowing seeds for our spring crops
- Developing the wildflower and ANZAC poppy gardens
- Creating some garden art
- Cooking with our delicious produce
- Holding a mini-market day to sell our produce to raise money towards a garden shed.



We got started on our gardening for this term by spending some time in the orchard today.  There were lots of sneaky invasive weeds in and around our fruit trees so we pulled lots of these out. We also planted lots of daffodil bulbs that were really desperate to get into the ground.  Hopefully they will flower for us this year. We also divided up some of the garlic bulbs that we must have missed when we harvested the garlic last year.  This is a bit of an experiment to see if the individual cloves will fatten up into bulbs.  We will have to give them lots of food to help them grow.

Otis and Ben also spent a lot of time building a house for some baby snails and a spider that Otis found underneath a big rock.  Hopefully the snails will stay in their beautiful house and not come out to eat our plants!
                                 

Wednesday 4 June 2014

Fresh vegetables 

Today's blog was written by Evie.

It's been a few weeks since we have been able to have Gardening Club because of rain.  But rain is really good for the garden so when we got to the vegetable patches the plants were tall, healthy and enormous.

Feeding the vegetables

We weeded and fed the vegetable patch with compost tea.   We checked on all the different vegetables and herbs growing there - carrots, spring onions, potatoes, silver beet.  They are looking good.

After we watered, weeded and fed the vegetables we went over to the garden bed under Mrs Hahn's window.  There were lots of overgrown swan plants and weeds which we pulled out so that we can plant wild flowers there next time.  

 

The wild flowers will look great here and they will attract bees and help bees make honey.

9 April 2014

Today's blog post was written by Amie and Abbie

Today at Gardening Club we had the grand opening of the Play Garden. The play garden was made by Eva and Lucy's Grandfather, Mr Kelly. The Garden club children filled it with soil and planted the plants.











Mrs Hahn was our special guest for this occasion. Mrs Hahn made a speech, cut the ribbon and declared the play garden open!









Then the gardening club members all got to choose a toy to put in the play garden and spent the lunch time playing in the new garden.

Thank you to all the parents and grandparents that helped make this happen for the children of Good Shepherd School. We're sure the children of Good Shepherd School will enjoy playing in this garden.

2 April 2014

Today's blog post by Siena H and Grace

Today we planted poppies, marigolds, pansies and calendulas beside our vegetables.  These flowers are companion plants and they keep away insects that will eat our vegetables. These flowers also help the vegetables to grow better.

When we planted the flowers we dug a hole and put the flowers in with the roots facing down. Then we held the leaves up, put dirt over roots and pressed firmly on the dirt.

We watered the plants with compost tea.  The compost tea has water, worm wees, comfrey, slugs and snails in it.  It is really stinky but the plants love it.

Some of the gardeners went to the up top playground to get some mondo grass to plant in the new play garden.  The grand opening of the play garden will be next week! There will be toys in the garden for everyone to play with.