Our new "vertical garden" is progressing well.

 
 
Year 7E has finally started constructing their vertical garden.

After collecting dozens of 2 litre Coke bottles, we thought we had an ample supply to work with. By the time we finished for the day

                                                      we now realise that we need many

                                                                    more bottles.

Over 250 extra are needed to complete the wall.



It is an ongoing project, so over the next couple of months you will be able to follow the progress of their wall.

At the moment I will let some of the photos tell the story of their great effort.

Once the children have assembled all the bottles on the wall, they will begin to fill each bottle with soil.

Then they will be planting a variety of herbs and spreading plants, so that the whole structure will become a wall a various shades of green.

 

As the work progresses, I will update this site so that you can follow the progress.

 

 

Hopefully, if we can get the supply of bottles that we need, we should be ready to plant our garden in the first couple of weeks of next term

 

A Wet Beginning to the Year

With all the rain we've had, the children have not been able to get into the gardens on a weekly basis. They have managed to clear away many of the weeds that took over throughout the holidays and have started planting already. We have tomatoes, rocket and chives planted in the last week and we have Ceylon spinach, basil, coriander, mint, Brazilian spinach and oragano, that was left to grow over the holidays, thriving in this rain. Our yacon has also grown well in the wet.


The yacon is powering ahead

In our orchard all out fruit trees are powering on. Some, such as the cherry and the kiwifruit are finding the ground a little bit wet, but hopefully they will get achance to dry out in the next couple of weeks.



The 1st lime from our tree

Over the next couple weeks there will be a lot of activity in the main garden area. Not only will there be the usual planting, weeding and constucting of the gardens but we will also be starting two new projects.

A year 7 class are constucting a vertical garden. This will be built using recycled 2litre Coke bottles. The children are in the process of collecting the bottles and will soon start to design and assemble the wall. Once built and planted, it will give present a green garden growing vertically up the outside of the music rooms. we will be diplaying photos of itas it takes shape on this blog site.
It will join onto and compliment the existing wall mural done by indigenous artist Craig Wright.



"Wongai" The carpet snake.

Another group of  year 5, 6 and 7 students are building a frog pond in the main vegetable garden area.

Bunnings Warehouse at Morayfield has donated all the materials we need for this. It will be an above ground structure, built higher than cane toads can jump. Once completed I hope it will become a home for the many green tree frogs that we have around this area. it will also provide us with a space to grow water based vegetables, such as Brahmi and Watercress.

Hopefully we will start to see so better gardening weather in the coming weeks and the children will be able to really get into the gardening aspect of the the program.

Until next week,

Ross Tattersall

Kitchen garden Co-ordinator