Term 3 Week 10

This week we made some newspaper pots for seeds. 
Click on the link to see how we made them!

These are great because they can be planted straight into the ground when the seedlings are big enough to go into the garden...

Then we filled them with potting mix and planted some bean seeds in them.

We also planted our cute round french carrot seeds in two containers...

Miss Raven is taking them home to look after them for the 2 week break.

We are looking forward to seeing if they have all sprouted after the holidays...

The vegetables in our raised beds are growing well with all the Spring rain and sunshine. 

The kale and silverbeet is almost ready to be made into kale chips and silverbeet salad! We need to make some room for our beans and tomatoes...

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!

Week 5 Nelson Enviro Schools Action Project Fund

At Birchwood School and Birchwood Kindergarten our children love to eat fruit!  They already enjoy watching it grow and ripen on the few fruit trees we have, and eating it! 

They also love the look and smell of the blossom flowers, and watching bees pollinate them (from a safe distance without being stung!)

In Term 2 Miss Raven's application for $500 to fund an Action Learning Project between Birchwood School and Birchwood Kindy was accepted.

We would like to use this money to purchase some fruit trees to share between our two centres. 

As we have had ongoing issues with the plants in our raised beds being pulled out, we hope that larger fruit trees may fare better from vandals. 

Birchwood Kindergarten would like to plant a seedless grape along a fence that we share, and a blueberry bush and lemon tree in their grounds. They would share the fruit of these with Birchwood School. 

Birchwood School would like to plant some more fruit trees (the types to be decided following consultation with the students, their families, staff and the B.O.T) near the path that links the kindergarten and the school. 

We will all help plant, take care of, watch grow and (hopefully) share the fruits of in a few years time.

We will plan and undertake the work together so that this project will be a catalyst to continuing to grow the relationships between the school and kindergarten.

As a first step, this week we went for a walk with our Caretaker Mr Gillians and had a look to see what fruit trees we have. 

We found: 1 lemon meyer, 1 greengager plum, 1 omega plum, 2 pear trees, and 2 Feijoa trees 

The problems: Their flowers are pulled off so we never get any plums. People steal the pears before we get to eat them.The fruit is picked by children before it gets a chance to ripen.

At Birchwood Kindergarten:

3 Feijoa trees, 1 Mandarin tree and 1 Apple tree

Next we will consult the students, families, staff and Board of trustees about what type of trees they would like to plant.

Term Three Week 2 Getting Ready to Grow

This week the Enviro Club worked together to make up our new 4 tier grow house for the seedlings we are going to grow soon.

Here is everyone helping to put it up...

Miss Raven was really impressed with the teamwork and 'GRIT' we showed as we followed the instructions to assemble it.

Here we all are in front of the finished product!

Once we had assembled it we looked at the back of all the seed packets Miss Raven brought in the holidays for us to sow this term and next...

We learnt how to read when they can be planted where we live here in Nelson by looking at a colour coded map... 

All of these seeds need to be planted in Spring so we just have to wait now until the 1st of September!