Term 3 Week 9

This week we were happy to discover that most of our tomato seeds have sprouted!

We are keeping them in our seedling grow house until they are a bit bigger and stronger and are ready to be planted into larger pots of potting mix.

 We have been carefully watering them everyday and taking them outside into the sun. 

Tomatoes need as much natural light as possible or else they'll grow tall and spindly!

Here are our baby tomato seedlings...

Two of our strawberry plants are doing well, and two have died...

We aren't sure why because we cared for all of them in the same way.

Hopefully our two surviving plants will give us some strawberries before the end of the year!

This week our Agria seed potatoes were finally ready to be planted.

We planted them in 3 plastic planter bags, and a special potato pot that lets you lift the inner part up and see the potatoes growing!

We put them in the planter bags with their sprouts pointing up, then covered them with more compost...

Once the shoots appear through the soil, we will add more.

Hopefully we will have some yummy new potatoes before the summer holidays!

Next week we are going to make newspaper seed containers for our bean seeds.

Term 3 Week 8 Making Muffins!

This week was a super exciting one for our Enviro kids as we finally got our first taste of something we have grown! 

First we went and got our spinach...

Here is Cade cutting it for us...

Then we got four eggs from our chickens...

Here is Eva with the eggs...

We cut up the spinach thinly...

Then we followed this recipe... 
Click on the link if you would like to bake these at home!

http://www.annabel-langbein.com/recipes/cats-feta-and-spinach-savoury-muffins/574/

Here are Mella, Daniella, Cade and Bella taking turns to help...

Here our our yummy spinach and feta muffins 

ready to go into the oven...

And here they are when they came out!

Some people ate them, and others chose to take them home 

for their whanau.

We gave the left over muffins to Mr Herrick- our Principal, 

Mrs Hawkswell (who organises the care of our chickens) 

and Mr Gillions- our Caretaker, who all said that they were yummy!

We all hope we will get to make some more things to eat from our garden before the end of the year...

Term 3 Week 7 Tomatoes, Daffodils and Weeding

This week we planted some tomato seeds into our seed trays in special seed mix. Then we put them inside our special seed stand with moist paper towels on top. Hopefully they will sprout soon! 

After planting our seeds we went and looked at our beautiful daffodils. 

Some with orange trumpets have bloomed this week. 

We picked a bunch for our lovely office ladies so they are in or school reception for every one to enjoy!

Before school, after a night of rain when the soil was nice and soft, Miss Raven and Bella went and weeded our raised beds. It is much easier to weed when the soil is soft, and it is much nicer to weed in the morning when it is cool!

Next week we are going to make spinach muffins using eggs from our chickens and spinach from our garden!

Term Three Week Six: Spring has sprung!

This week we checked on our bulbs, chickens, raised beds and strawberries. 

Our bulbs are blooming beautifully... We are enjoying seeing all the different varieties of daffodils that we planted. Some of the earlier ones to bloom had orange trumpets!

Our chickens seem happy and enjoy it when students come and feed them chickweed from the gardens. They are laying eggs which the children from Seaview enjoy collecting, as do the Birchwood Kindergarten children.

Our kale is almost big enough to make kale chips from! Putting the plastic containers around our surviving plants has worked really well at keeping the bugs, slugs and snails away!

Our remaining spinach is getting bigger too... Hopefully we can make some savoury feta and spinach muffins using this and some of our chickens eggs soon! Click on the link for a yummy recipe!

Our silverbeet it growing better too now the bugs, slug and snails have stopped feasting on it!

Our beetroot is slowly getting bigger too... Did you know the leaves are also edible as they come from the same plant family as spinach?

Two of our 4 strawberry plants are growing well. 

We don't understand why the other two are not when they have all had the same treatment! We hope the other two will begin to look happier and healthier soon!

After we looked at all of these we discussed which seeds we would like to try and grow first now that the weather and soil is getting warmer... 

We picked the 'Tiny Tom' tomato seeds.

We had hoped to have planted our seed potatoes by now but they haven't sprouted enough yet! 

Hopefully they will have chitted enough to plant soon... 

Chitting is basically another word for sprouting. What you do when you chit your seed potatoes is speed up the ageing process of the potato, by exposing it to light and, more importantly, a bit of warmth. This causes the eyes of the seed potato to start sprouting. We hope they hurry up and chit enough to plant soon!