Garden Club

Potato Patch

The new sweet potato patch has been piled with so much leaf material and other organic matter, that cherry tomatoes and mint have sprouted from the substrate. 

We will let these crops continue to grow with the sweet potato. We will now wait for the sweet potato to develop and harvest in December.

Meanwhile the original sweet potato garden bed will be dug out and the soil will be rejuvenated. We will place old newspaper and cardboard to prevent any sweet potato from growing and just pile more leaf material and other organic matter. This will allow the soil to be enriched to prepare for a new crop. The only things growing will be clover, normally a weed, however it is known also to add more nutrients into the soil by fixing atmospheric (from the sky) nitrogen.

Mrs Gastin Garden

We recently began removing some substrate from the garden to let more rainfall to be trapped within the barrier’s boundary, however this was rejuvenated by contract gardeners. New mulch and some flowering plants were added. 

We will continue to maintain the new plants and introduce our planned flowering herbs and veggies. We encourage students to take additional care when retrieving items during lunch-time games around the garden beds.

Pre-loved Garden Equipment

At garden club we are reluctant to buy new garden equipment because it lets us solve problems with items and packaging that we have access to, here are some of our hacks:

1. 10 Litre mayonnaise buckets are used for storage or substitute for pots

2. The lids from the 10 Litre mayonnaise buckets are used as weights to stop things from blowing away, the pattern it makes is described as “dragon skin”or “dragon blister”.

3. 2 Litre chicken salt buckets are used for watering crops and collecting compost from the classrooms.

4. Mineral water bottles are used to jam the bubblers so we can obtain aconstant flow of water.

5. Paper shopping bags are used as blankets in our worm farm, the worms appreciate a darker environment and lets them process more compost to make fertiliser faster.

We are constantly developing new ways to make chores in Garden Club easier and efficient. We are able to achieve two vital environmental targets, prevent packaging into landfill and to extend the life of a product before retiring for recycling.