Kitchen Garden session 4 with 3/4C

This week was all about harvesting, maintenance and potting.

As a warm up we continued the garden treasure hunt, writing down some new plants we found while exploring the garden space.

Most of the corn was harvested today, with another bed to harvest for our cooking session. The Hot Chillie Peppers, JEPK Gardener’s and The Shredders groups picked the cobs from the corn plants and put them in baskets, used loppers to trim the stems off at ground level and then stripped leaves from the stems. The leaves will go in the compost bins and the stems will be used as both garden stakes or buried using a ‘trench composting’ method directly into the garden beds.

The Pink Beans group raked up fallen, dried tree leaves to put into our ‘carbon or brown’ bays beside the compost bins. We add a ‘carbon’ layer over each layer of ‘greens’ or classroom scraps that is tipped into the compost bins.

The Tomatoes group potted up cuttings of rosemary and made cardboard pots and planted a climbing pea seed in each one.

To end the session, we listened to each other’s garden and cooking experiences from the weekend while we all enjoyed a slice of Zucchini and Lemon Cake.

Autumn in the Garden

Its Autumn and in the garden that means its the time when the Summer crops of tomatoes, zucchinis, cucumbers, chillies, capsicums etc begin to slow their fruiting and die off.

Not to worry though! You can prepare you beds by fertilising them with some blood and bone, seamungus (pelletised seaweed) and rooster booter (pelletised chook poo) and lightly digging it into the soil.

Add a layer of well broken down compost. Mulch it with a thin layer of pea straw. Let it sit for a week and decide what youd like to plant.

This time of the year you can plant broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, peas, leek, celery, spring onion, beetroot, lettuce, silverbeet, spinach, carrots and kale to name a few.

Plant your desired vegetables as per packed/ punnet instructions and enjoy watching them grow as you nurture them and before you know it they'll be ready for you to harvest and enjoy.

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Year 5/6