March and April in the Garden

Well it was a hot start to the year and the heat kept coming through March and April. It wasn't enough to stop our great young gardeners though, with lots of jobs getting done over the past 2 months.

Firstly, let's talk about poo! Poo week was a lot of fun, but we had some serious experimenting to do too. Grades 3- 6 tracked the growth of the plants in their 4 pots of different manure over a period of 5 weeks. Cow manure (one of our cold manures with less nutrient) was quick off the mark and lead the way through most of the experiment in all classes. But by the end, chicken (hot manure with high nutrient levels) caught up and we ended up with a tie.

Grades 1 and 2 learned to make carrot tape. Carrot seeds are small and hard to plant, and often need thinning as they grow. With carrot tape, they are nicely spaced before planting and can be rolled out quickly when you're ready to plant! We used new toilet paper which will dissolve when wet. The kids put a dob of glue made from flour and water every 5cm and placed one seed on each dob. Then we folded the paper lengthways to seal it.

The grades 1 & 2 have also been great at keeping cabbage moth caterpillars off our chinese wombok and dichon radish.

Grade 6 had an opportunity to make scarecrows at the end of term 1. Hopefully you will see them appearing around the school soon. Thank you Xavier for posing as a scarecrow for us! Why are you so good at being a scarecrow? Hay! It's in my jeans!

Why didn't the scarecrow eat his dinner? Because he was stuffed!

Term 2 started strongly. Grades prep to 4 learned about bees and even got to see inside a beehive, minus the bees of course! They saw how bees went in and out of the hive, and saw the full frames of honey, sealed with beeswax. Then we listened to the beautiful sound of the wax being scraped off (so ASMR) and put it in the spinner. Then centrifugal force, like playing corners in the car, flung the honey out of the comb and into the spinner, where we caught and then tasted the honey. So good!

Grades 5/6 are starting a new endeavour this term, managing their own farms! They

will need to plan everything themselves, plant, weed and maintain their farms physically, but also financially. Everything they need will have a price, as will everything they sell.

We have already started off by earning Violet St dollars in a garden related quiz, and purchasing our farms and first crops to be planted. Some farms were so popular that they had to go to auction!

We're all looking forward to learning a lot of new skills and putting them all into practice with our farms this year.

As mentioned earlier in the year, if anyone has access to sheep or cow manure, we'd love to hear from you as we have plenty more beds to do. And our new farmers will likely want to use some to improve their soil. You can email me at Daniel.Halliday@education.vic.gov.au

We would also like to get more seedlings going, so if you have any old seedling punnets, please drop them in to the garden center and we'll make good use of them.

Dan

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