The Growing Patch

The Growing Patch Report End of Term 1 2021

The Grade 4s have been very busy working in our Growing Patch this term. Every week two classes have a gardening and a cooking lesson. The lessons connects the students with their environment, involves them in cultivating, harvesting and preparing the seasonal food they grow to eat.

We have been harvesting lots of veggies including corn, carrots, capsicum, spring onion tomatoes and cucumbers to make delicious corn fritters and a salad. They have also picked peaches and rhubarb to make fruit crumble too.

This term we are planting a couple of new vegetables for our students to try, ready for the winter, cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli and kale. We are also learning about taking cuttings and seeds from existing plants to garden sustainably

This term we have been incredibly fortunate to have some very special donations from some of our families. One of which was an apple tree donated by the Soc-Kloth family. Both boys came out to the growing patch to plant it and what a good job they did. The tree is thriving, so fingers crossed in produces some apples in a few years. 

The donations didn’t stop there, The Dempsey family donated 2 very large boxes of packs of seeds from snow peas to beans, radish to cabbage. The students are really going to enjoy planting those next term.

And finally, this Monday Trish Porter came in and help us build a Subpod which she kindly donated to the school. With the help of Bentleigh and Atticus and some of their grade buddies we worked hard to put the Subpod together. 

What is a Subpod I hear you ask… a Subpod is an in-garden compost system that doubles up as a garden seat. ... The unit is simple to assemble, then can be tucked into a new or existing raised garden bed or dug into a ground level garden. Once it's in the soil, you add composting worms, let them settle in and then add your organic matter from your kitchen to the subpod and let the worms do the rest, while you grow your organic veggies and fruits. Find out some more info about this amazing composting system here.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16TF26UAoj85x5x6M7RbKmwd7xvAZeWFE/view?usp=sharing

The subpod is perfect for the growing patch as we already have worm farms to compost any organic waste from classrooms so this just helps Lyndhurst try to become even more sustainable.

Thank you so much to all the families

The Wellbeing team