Friday 8 September 2017

Goodbye Winter...Welcome Spring

It has been an eventful couple of months at Garden to Table. We have hosted lots of visitors, cooked some delicious food using some amazing produce from the garden and spent a lot of time in the garden feeding the soil and preparing it for planting the seeds we have been germinating.

Linda Taylor, Al Brown and Andrew Keaney from T and G Global visited the school to produce the video to promote the NZ Young Gardener of the Year competition. We had a load of fun and are putting together our applications now to enter the competition!
 T and G Global donated an apple tree to all GTT schools. The children planted our tree in our new Pollinator Garden which is beyond the Butterfly Meadow. We have been given various types of manure - pigeon poo and horse manure which has been used to feed the soil and we have used peastraw from Matangi School in Tamahere to mulch all our gardens. Coffee grounds from Al Browns restaurants are being used as a fertilizer along with worm tea from our worm farms. Our apple tree will grow a treat! 
We have had many comments on how fertile the soil looks in the gardens and how lush the vegetables look. All our mulching and feeding of the soil is paying off.
Podgardening.co.nz has some great advice on composting and nourishing the soil.

A big thanks to Kelvin from Sunhill Gardens sunhillgardencentre.co.nz who has donated broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower seedlings that we have planted in the Gingko garden and to all those families that have donated lemons, limes, oranges and grapefruit.
Chantal Organics chantalorganics.co.nz donated some wonderful organic products - Apple Cider Vinegar, Tamari Sauce and Sesame Oil that we have used in the kitchen. Delicious!
 Quinoa Fried Rice                                     Pot Sticker Dumplings

Year 5 groups and their mise en place pronounced (MEEZ ahn plahs), means to have all your ingredients prepared and ready to go before you start cooking. Translated, “ to put in place.”





Dehydrating wood ear fungus

Chinese visitors

In mid August our exchange students from Ningbo, Shanghai joined in with Room 35 and experienced a Garden to Table session. Harvesting, painting signs and planting seeds. All working together as a team, the language barrier didn't matter!


 In the kitchen we used freshly harvested cabbage, mint, sorrel and parsley to make a Seedy slaw, we baked apples and made a star anise custard and used harvested Jerusalem artichokes, a pumpkin from our garden and kumara to make a Roasted vegetable pasta