GARDEN

Room 14 has been putting in some hard yards in our very own veggie garden. It is situated behind Room 5 and just outside the back door to our classroom. We decided we wanted our garden to be different and memorable, therefore we thought we would fill it with 'weird and whacky' recycled items which would either contain the plants or help them to grow. We also decided that our garden would be an example of sustainability. All the plants that we have planted and will continue to plant have seeds that we can reuse to maintain our crops. We understand that it is important to think about the future generations and think of ways to keep the growing cycle going!

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We all completed a garden design which showed what we thought the garden should look like. Some of these are in the powerpoint presentation below and more will be scanned and added to this page soon. We have incorporated elements of all the designs into our garden and we are looking to install the toilet bowls, the deck chairs and the basin in the next week.



One of our gardens really awesome features is the green wall. Ben came up with the idea of using old 3 litre juice bottles as planter containers. The class have worked with Mike, our caretaker to attach the recycled bottles to planks of wood which are on the side of Room 5. The class screwed the bottles onto the wall and planted them with various plants. Our bottle wall includes herbs, lettuces and edible flowers and it looks very cool!

Our garden also has a new irrigation system which Mike installed for us during the holidays. This means that we can easily water our garden using recycled water rather than wasting a precious resource. Next to the tank we have our own worm farm which we are going to start feeding with our class food scraps. This means our garden will be fully sustainable and can be watered with worm tea to assist the growing.

We are starting to use the produce from our gardens to cook with and will be doing lots more of this next term when we have the pizza oven up and running. We hd heaps of parsley and basil which would have died in the frosts so we decided to have a pesto making afternoon. It was really fun and lots of us tried pesto for the first time. We have now frozen it so that we can use it on our pizza bases at a later date.

Below are some of the photos from 350 day! We planted 350+ Manuka seedlings so that we are putting back the wood we used in our oven, into the environment!

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