DNI Kitchen Garden

Kitchen Garden Update

2011-05-02T03:10:00.000-07:00

It is now the beginning of May 2011. I don't know where the time has gone. We have just finished our second successful year of planting and harvesting from our kitchen garden. In 2009/10 we planted out whatever crops the kids wanted and hoped for the best. In 2010/11 we had a plan, rotating the beds and planting crops we knew would be successful. Although we had a bumper crop, the kitchen garden is not as yet as successful as it could be. We can improve crop choice by making sure that we only plant vegetables that will be used in the Food Technology programme as well as those that kids can pick and eat raw, as they are working in the garden or are just walking by. We also need to improve our successive planting so that we have a constant supply rather than everything being ready at once.

It is mid autumn now and we have just begun preparing the beds for winter. Today we began harvesting the last of the vegetables, which include a ton of spring onions and green tomatoes. We will research ways of using these over the next few days. We still have to finish this job before turning the soil over and digging in our worm farm compost. Lastly, plant out in winter bedding - which will be dug over in summer to add nitrogen and other goodies to the soil for our next growing season.

A change this year is that the recipes designed by the students will be on a separate page of this blog (click on links at the top of the page) rather than on our wikispace as in previous years. Another change is that the Food Technology Y7 Module Groups will be responsible for planning, planting, maintaining and harvesting the garden as well as using the produce in their cooking. They will also be responsible for keeping this blog up to date from now on.

Potatoes in Tyres

2009-08-25T22:56:00.000-07:00

Today we planted our first potatoes. We placed the tyres on top of a few layers of newspaper and half filled each one with compost. There was quite a lot of discussion about how many seed potatoes to place in each tyre but the general concensus was three. Three were duly placed on their side with lots of eyes facing upwards. We covered these with pea straw, filling the rims as well as the centre. Two tyres contain ? and the third Moemoe, a traditional Maori potato that is purple in colour. We will plant more out later. Thanks to Tyler, Jack,Tai and Regan for their hard work.

Our first real harvest

2009-08-24T21:26:00.000-07:00

In term 4 last year a small group of students worked with Mr Tz to build a raised vegetable garden at the School. One of our parents planted some winter greens (blue lupin, black oats, broad beans and mustard) to help improve the soil quality ready for spring planting this year.

One bed was planted out in green vegetables (lettuce, silverbeet, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and a few other goodies). We lost our lettuces to hungry passers-by but have not had any recent troubles of this nature! Replacements in the form of fresh silverbeet from a friendly member of our community saw us enjoying fresh greens in the Food Tech Room over the winter, supplemented by harvesting our own school grown silverbeet as needed. Today we picked our first broccoli heads. Our Y8 recipes can be found on the DNI Recipe Book wikispace and our Y7 recipes can be found on this blog (links on the left side of this page) over the course of the year. Note that the broccoli plants will continue to give us smaller heads over the next wee while.