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