Category: Garden/Kitchen

Term 4 so far!

PRODUCE

The garden has been quite productive again this term, supplying much of the ingredients for the kitchen menus. This produce included broccoli, cauliflower, celery, rhubarb, lemons, lemongrass, broad beans, spring onions, coriander, oregano, thyme, parsley, silver beet, mint, carrots, nasturtium leaves & flowers and of course eggs!

LESSONS

The older students have spent some lesson time attending to the jobs that just need to be done – weeding and pulling out old crops! The big leaves from the winter crops are now decomposing in our big compost bin to make compost for our garden.

With the unusually hot days earlier this week garden lesson was inside – sketching leaves.  The effort put in by the students was evident – all the sketches were very good. They will finish them next lesson, adding labels.

The sequence of key stages in the life cycle of a plant or animal is a curriculum Science topic so it was timely to receive some silkworms and to find tadpoles in our pond. The middle primary lessons revolved around sharing their own knowledge as well as thinking up many, many more questions for us to research.

Lessons have also included planting our summer crops.

Menu for kitchen – sushi, Vietnamese rice paper rolls, vegetable gyoza, vegetable samosa, vegie croquettes.

Although term 3 is winter, we have been very busy in our SAKG Program!

The year 6 & 7 focused on Sustainability in our School for the first part of the term. Later in the term the year 7’s organised a Scavenger Hunt around the garden and invited Mrs. James’ class to join them. The year 7’s took on the role of guides and engaged the younger students very well.

After a very sensible question from a younger students ‘How do you know which ones are weeds?’, the year 6s took photos of weeds for all the classes to use.

The middle primary classes helped with the general running of the gardens with learning to weed, prune and prepare and improve our garden beds. The last couple of lessons the 4/5 classes have looked at worms. They have looked at them under magnifying glasses and learnt some amazing things about worms!

Mrs. Loveday’s class were very excited this week to see the tomato seedlings they planted a fortnight ago have germinated!

The seedlings we planted 3 months ago were harvested this term and used in our kitchen lessons. Sheena-Margot sourced some amazing recipes to use our produce in some exciting recipes! Dolmades using nasturtium leaves and stuffed nasturtium flowers were yummy as well as nettles tea.

Our Garden is constantly thriving, with kilo’s and kilo’s of produce being picked each week. We have some fantastic helpers at lunch times, the students put in a lot of effort each garden lesson, and we have some brilliant volunteers that come in to help out. Our garden is very healthy with all sorts of living things growing and surviving in there.

Wendy and the students have been very busy in our many gardens, weeding, mulching, harvesting and getting plots ready for winter crops.

It is always exciting when you get to harvest from your own garden, and the students have an extra sense of proud when they see what they have helped grown. All our produce gets either used in our Kitchen lessons, in the canteen or sold at our Garden Market every Thursday afternoon.

Check out some of our latest harvests.