Tuesday 15 December 2015

Garlic harvesting room 9

We know our garlic is ready after it has been 6 months in the ground and the bottom leaves are turning brown and it is almost the longest day of the year ! 

Garlic in brown bag with instructions to hang bulbs outdoors in a shaded place away from rain for 2 days till bulbs are dry then ready to eat ! 

Kiera , Cody , Eamon and Finnean with the garlic they harvested today ! 

Saturday 8 August 2015

ROOM 3 - Winter -Term 3 2015

Room 3 - Welcome to the School and to your Veggie Garden at school !
Great to work with you in the garden !
We talked about seeds and about the lifecycle of a plant.
Then we planted lettuce seeds in pots. 
We will keep our pots in the potting shed and water it every week so our seed can grow! 

Adding the seed raising mix to the pot
This is our classroom outdoors !

ROOM 9 - Winter - Term 3 2015

TERM 3 - Room 9 in the garden
Preparing the soil for spring 
We added our own CTS made organic compost, sheep manure that was kindly donated to us and a layer of pea straw. 
We removed some new weeds, then raked the soil slowly back and forth to level the surface
We added organic compost to feed the soil, then we planted garlic that will be ready in the summer !



Our chalk board in our potting shed !

Wednesday 3 June 2015

Room 13 - Winter - Term 2 - 2015


TERM 2 - Room 13 in the garden
We harvested our pumpkin and we made a delicious soup ! 




chopping the leeks, spring onions and the pumpkin !



Monday 23 March 2015

Autumn 2015

ROOM 4 Gardeners clearing around the leeks, so that our leeks grow strong!
We learnt that plants compete for space and nutrients, so we clear away the weeds we don't need.
 Measuring our 1st rock melon ! Still growing !
 A different type of cucumber! This one is called Apple Cucumber and it is round in shape!

 Identifying bad weeds and self seeded plants we may want to keep, here India points to a "baby poppy" as she called it, and she wants to keep it in the garden, so we all have a look at it and decided we shall not pull it out.
 Our beans were an experiment- we took the beans out of a pod that dried out from another patch in our garden and we planted in garden bed number 1 to see if they would grow.
And yes the bean plants are grown even though the weather is cooling down.

 COMPOSTING 
Adding compost to our garden improves soil fertility and stimulates healthy root development in plants.
But first we need to help the microorganisms and earth worms to help us turn our food scraps and our garden waste into nutrients for the garden soil.

We have a new compost bin, it came flat packed in a cardboard box
We assembled it and found a spot for it next to our existing bins
The bin contains holes so that air can get in and all the living organism in there can have a happy healthy life while munching on the materials we add to the bin
 The cardboard box the bin came in was not wasted, we torn it into pieces and added to our compost as a layer of carbon material to help make our scraps turn into compost for our garden

 WATERING
 Here we demonstrate how we should water our plants, by applying water to the soil by the root system
as we know that the plants will drink the water using their roots and stem as "straw".





 Adding the CARBON layer
the brown dry scraps


 Adding a layer of "green" stuff or fruit peelings and leftovers from our lunch boxes
so this is our NITROGEN layer


Bellow is a chart showing us what we should add to our compost bins so that microorganisms can turn it into compost for our garden