Term 4 Week 2 Beans and fruit trees!

On Wednesday after school Miss Raven, our school Caretaker Mr Gillions, and a special wee helper (Miss Raven's son Matti) got the soil ready and made tee pees from bamboo poles for our bean seedlings to grow up. 

They also transplanted the baby carrot seedings into one of the other raised beds because half of these were knocked over by a soccer ball hitting their container outside Miss Raven's classroom at lunchtime! We hope some of them will survive! Grow carrots grow!

On Thursday before school and at lunchtime Liam, Bella and Leo helped to plant 20 of the the bean seedlings that we grew last term, one at the base of each bamboo pole.

After planting the seedlings and watering them, we watered our seed potatoes and strawberries which are continuing to grow well.

On Friday after school the plants for the Birchwood School and BIrchwood Kindergarten Action Learning Project were delivered. We are really looking forward to planting these in our grounds and watching them grow as we do!

Here are our new fruit trees arriving on the back of the truck.

We are really fortunate that a member of staff has donated an extra $200 so we were able to purchase more fruit trees than we were originally going to be able to buy!

Hopefully each class will help Mr Gillions plant one of these fabulous fruit trees in the next couple of weeks. 

This term at Birchwood School our Social Science Inquiry is called 'We are Family'. 
The big question we are asking is: "How do we make our community special?" 

We hope that by seeing their desire to have more fruit trees at our learning centre realised, by helping choose which type of trees are being planted, by helping plant them and by taking care of them Birchwood students will feel empowered by this Action Learning Project.

With luck, some of these students will one day have children of their own who will attend our learning centres and they will be able to tell them how they helped to plant these fruit trees and make our Birchwood School and Kindergarten community special.

Term 4 Week 1

This week we were so excited to see how much our seeds, potatoes and vegetables in our raised beds had grown during the holidays with all the spring rain and warm weather....

Here are our strawberry plants and carrot seedlings...

Our potatoes have all sprouted too!

These are our tomato seedlings which we are going to keep growing in our seedling house in Miss Raven's classroom until they are big enough to go in the garden...

Here are the bean seeds we planted before the holidays...

We are going to plant a bean tee pee with them as soon as they are big enough! 

On Monday Bella, Thea-Jane and Tyesha came to harvest our kale and make kale chips...

Once we had cut the kale, we checked out our other vegetables. 

Our broccoli is growing nicely...

 Our celery, silverbeet, and beetroot are all ready to be eaten too.

Our garlic is growing nicely as well. It is meant to be harvested on the shorted day of the year which is the 22nd of December. 

We took the kale to the kitchen and rinsed it and ripped it into small pieces.

We sprayed it with olive oil and sprinkled it with a little salt.

Then we put it in the oven at 175 degrees celsius for about ten minutes.

We baked it until it went brown on the edges.

Then we took it out and waited for it to cool.

Once it was cool we tried some. It was yummy! 

Bella, Thea-Jane and Tyesha took a bag home each to share with their families...

Here is a link to the recipe we used for baked kale chips if you want to try and make some at home!

In order to make space for our seedlings, Miss Raven harvested our other vegetables on Thursday.

She put the celery, silverbeet, spinach and beetroot into recycled supermarket bags and offered it to the Enviro Club children who had planted, watered and weeded it. 

Here it all is ready to go home next to the Seaview Block children's lettuces.

This Wednesday Cade, one of our Enviro Club students, started making a wooden box from an old crate his Dad got from his work with our Caretaker Mr Gillions. He is planning to plant the New World 'Little Garden' seedlings that his class is growing in it.

If you are growing New World Little Garden seedlings

at home too, click on this link to go to there webpage for information on how to repot your seedlings and great growing hints and tips. The website also has some fun activities too! 

Enjoy growing your own little garden at home...

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!