Kitchen Garden
From Jill & Simone:
LA13E
11.6.26:
Following Acknowledgements of Country, rainbow chard and mustard greens were harvested, prepared and refrigerated to cook with tomorrow. We removed dying perilla and weedy native violets and trimmed the Warrigal greens. clearing the beds ready for compost to be “creamed” into the depleted soil, ready for our next plantings. Hessian sacks were then cut to fit the beds and keep the pigeons out!!
Hundreds of snails, down from previous weeks’ thousands, were collected & put in snail jail as were 5 buckets of lunchtime rubbish from around the grounds, including one of 10c containers.
Heading inside, LA13E learnt about botanical names & researched their own plant from the garden and presented their findings to the class. That was followed by eggshell crushing and making some perilla cordial with the leaves picked today. There was also a lot of students in LA13E who wrote journal entries in our Kitchen Garden journal, the most in a class so far!
12.6.26:
Today was LA13E’s last cooking day, and the last of the grade 5/6 classes for this year! We made zongzi, the traditional Chinese bamboo-wrapped sticky rice parcels we have been making with all the grade 5/6s. Hildegard did a great job of explaining the history behind zongzi and why it is eaten at this time of year. Then we got started!
Zongzi are not easy to learn, but LA13E really picked it up fast. After watching Simone’s demonstration, they got stuck into practising how to fold, fill then wrap up the parcels. We were all amazed at how quickly they learnt it. They made two zongzi each, savoury with dried mushroom and garden greens, then sweet with sultanas.
We also finished making the perilla cordial so everyone could have some with their sweet zongzi. Once we add the something acidic (lemon juice) to the perilla syrup it turns the cordial a beautiful bright pink. Always fun to watch a chemical reaction in the kitchen!
A big thank you to Martina, Jane and Maureen for coming to lend helping hands. Thank you LA13E it was great to have you in Kitchen Garden!
LA6C were the next class in Kitchen Garden for term 2, but we will save telling you all about what they got up to until the next newsletter, so they can have both their KG weeks in the same newsletter.
If you’ve taken home an orange 10c-container bag, please return it in the first week of term 3. We have a container collection already booked. Thank you!
Thank you to all students this term. We’ve had exceptionally busy and hard-working teams in the garden and achieved so much more than our newsletters can convey.
