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