The end of another year

All classes have had their last GTT session for the year and they were AWESOME! The weather has kept us on our toes with rain, thunder, hail and sun all in one day in most cases. Bob had the pizza oven stoked up by 8.30am every morning, regardless of the weather, and grandson Campbell was a great assistant.

Homemade pizzas using vegetables and herbs harvested from the garden and Mini rhubarb and fruit mince pies for the Year 5's and Strawberry santas for the Year 4's were on the menu.

Gardeners tidied up the gardens in preparation for the Christmas break. Rhubarb and broadbeans were harvested then weighed, bagged and stored in the freezer for next year. Parsley, rosemary and marjoram were harvested to make herb salts and plenty of weeding was done by all. 

Lots of thankyous to all our volunteers this year and special awards to those children who have really embraced GTT in every way this year. Well done to all!

Afternoon tea ideas

We made homemade cheese (herb labne), crackers (rosemary and seed lavash) and kale chips. A great idea for afternoon tea or if you have visitors over. You will be sure to impress! Recipes found on the blog

Pasta

Year 5 children have been using the pasta machines to create amazing fresh pasta to serve with some fantastic produce harvested from our gardens. The rain and warmer weather over the past month along with the mulching and feeding that the gardeners have been doing over the year has helped our gardens and everything is looking so lush!
We made a spring vegetable lasagna with asparagus, fennel, broadbeans, celery, sprouting broccoli and carrots from our garden. Pumpkin and thyme filled tortellini. Fettucine with polpette using kale and a minted tomato sauce. Silverbeet and pumpkin rotollo.

Spring flowers

We have been very creative and have produced beautiful observational artwork of the spring flowers in our garden. The colours have brightened the walls of our kitchen and have definately brought the outside inside!

Fabulous vegetables were harvested for our Spring vegetable curry. Rainbow beet, fennel, asparagus, white carrots, celery, Jerusalem artichokes, broadbeans and amazing sprouting broccoli. This was served with rice and radish raita. Lemons from our tree were used to make a lemon curd that we dolloped into homemade mini tartlet cases

Special guests and fabulous volunteers

Over the past few months we have had many visitors observing our GTT programme. Groups of staff and specialists from other GTT schools new to the programme have come along to see how we run our sessions and see the children in action. In mid August we hosted the UAE's Minister for Food Security, Her Excellency Mariam bint Mohammed Saeed Hareb Al Mehairi at the request of the NZ Trade and Enterprise. She was so enthusiastic and very impressed with the programme. We were honored to have her visit.
We made a Quinoa salad with root vegetables and crispy kale, a Winter salad with crispy chickpeas and Fruit and spice baked apples with custard.

 Year 5's Room 21 were very lucky to have Carol's Mum, Vera showing us how to make perfect Pot Sticker dumplings. We filled them with cabbage, spring onions and wood ear fungus we harvested, along with garlic, ginger and soy sauce. They were delicious with a soy, sesame and coriander dipping sauce.

Year 4's had an Indian inspired menu making Curried vegetable fritter, Mint raita and Nankhatai which are eggless buttery Indian cookies

Check out our soil samples taken from different parts of the school. What can you see that is different? Results to follow in the next blog update

Winter months in the garden

We have been busy in the garden feeding and insulating the soil for the winter. Mulching using seagrass collected by Year 6 Waterwise children at Okahu Bay. Feeding the soil with worm castings and worm tea and used coffee grinds.

Planting broadbeans, cabbages, sprouting broccoli and other winter crops and we have been experimenting with growing garlic. Children have made and painted signs so that all the crops that have been planted can be identified.

 We are very excited with how the prepared olives from our school tree have turned out and they were delicious on the wood fired pizzas we made at the end of Term 2.

The Garden to Table Club with our school grown and prepared olives on pizza bread.

Team work!

Preparing persimmons to dehydrate

Bananas growing