Feed the soil!

Today was all about caring for our plants. We can't take them for a walk but they still need feeding! 

First of all we pulled out the weeds because weeds take away food from our vegetables. 

Then Mrs Mardell sprinkled on blood and bone fertiliser. It's the most organic and SAFE fertiliser to use. We want to use safe products as we have small people around and these are vegetables we will eat. What we eat becomes us. 

The blood and bone was stinky a few people said. We discussed where blood and bone came from. 

We either raked the blood and bone into the soil or we covered it with ready prepared compost. 

When it rains the nutrients will wash into the soil and our plants will suck them up through their roots. 

What we planted: 

A courgette plant. An alternative name for courgette is zucchini. 

An aubergine or eggplant plant. (Another plant with two names)

Six cherry tomato plants. Because Tomoto plants produce big tomato crops they need extra food. We dug the holes deeper than we needed we put tomato food in the bottom, covered the food with soil, then planted the tomato plants on top. These plants we need to keep well watered to have lots of juicy fat tomatoes! 

Inspiration!

This is why I like social media. Idea sharing. How fabulous would one of these be as a bench for us to work around potting and raising trays of seedlings on? Recycled and low cost. 

Room 5 have begun their garden adventure

This week we are back into our garden to table program. 

The gardens were a picture of abundance. They had grown crazily over the warm wet holiday period.

We all got to eat fresh peas straight from their pods. 

At home remember to wait for the pods to become fatter if you are picking peas to eat. Leave the white flowers so they become the 'seeds' of the pea plant. 

Pea plants are amazing because you can eat the shoots (soft sweet leaves and stems), the peas and the pods. 

The broccoli plant in our garden has produced a broccoli floret, then because we were on holiday the plant let the floret bloom. So we learnt that the broccoli we eat is actually immature flower buds. Wow! We are leaving the flowers to attract insects and of course the bees!

We also noticed that the pakchoy and kale flowers look similar. And this is because all three plants are related.

They are from the brassica family. 

Mrs Mardell did some research and found things she never knew. The brassica family all originated from a mustard plant. Each different brassica plant became unique when different parts of the plant became features. The plants became more and more different to each other when the same pollen of plants with the same feature was mixed together to make new seeds. The infographic explains this a lot better.

These are our common brassicas in NZ.

Mrs Mardell told the class she had planted a brassica which was romanceso broccoli. It had amazing spirals rather than rounded bud forms and looked in between the colour of cauliflower and broccoli. It tasted delicious. Much better than shop bought cauliflower pr broccoli. 

What else did we do?

We were so busy learning about gardening gloves, how to pull out weeds, how to plant, where the compost is made, what compost is, harvesting lettuces and beetroot that we forgot to take photos. Here is what we have. 

A few of us planted lavender to attract the bees in the middle of each vegetable plot. The lavender makes our gardens look pretty and has a beautiful fragrance too.