Autumn gardening with Te Huruhi Primary School

This year the school has decided to make the programme available for all Year 5 children. They will attend Garden to Table all year - each group will come every fortnight therefore enabling the children to experience all the seasons in the garden and kitchen and become confident gardeners and cooks by the end of the year.

The garden and their first session

We had a great turn out of keen volunteers both new and existing and we are delighted to have their support and the new skills they bring, making the programme both possible and all the more enjoyable!

There are two main gardens and a well-established orchard. In their first session the children harvested herbs, lettuce, courgettes, tomatoes, pears and figs for lunch. They made courgette fritters, pesto and tomatoes on bruschetta and salad of the imagination. We have a new Kitchen Specialist who takes time out from his busy role as head chef from a well know winery restaurant which is a real treat and the kitchen team ran very smoothly and efficiently despite it being a first on many counts – look out Masterchef we have some stars in the making! We have some yacon growing in the garden for the first time so that will make an interesting research project for the kitchen kids and we can’t wait to see how they decide to use it!

Among the showers of rain, we were able to talk about seed gathering and how we will do this once the sun comes back out. We will save the seed for next year and also package some seed up to sell at our harvest market that we sometimes have when there is excess produce. The school families are able to buy the produce and the funds help to run the Garden to Table programme. We also managed to plant some dwarf beans, beetroot and lettuce. We gave the soil a good dig in with some Tui Blood & Bone and Tui Lime to give the new plants a boost to get going.

In the garden over the coming weeks we plan to plant seeds to keep the produce flow steady. Tui Organic Seed Raising Mix is great for this until the seeds have developed enough to go into bigger pots when the Tui mix provides all the goodies the seedlings need to grow well. Then it’ll be into the garden where we will definitely need some Tui Quash – and we’ll have to come up with some creative ideas to stop the birds from shredding the leafy greens – we love the challenge! I think we might start gathering materials for a scarecrow or two…!

Our school has limited garden space so last year we experimented with a variety of pots and vessels – we grew potatoes in old metal rubbish bins which worked well and we’ll do it again, also we tried growing carrots in large pots with a mix of Tui Garden Mix, Tui Vegetable Mix and river sand (in equal proportions) to try and keep the soil loose and not grow too many multi limbed carrots! This worked well too so we’ll do that again too.

Other crops to grow and plant will include winter brassicas, salad vegetables, spring onions and leeks, leafy greens like spinach, kale and silver beet and radishes are always good but we’ll remember to pick them before they get this big!

Giant radish! The boys are very excited about their giant radish that has grown over the holidays!

Tui & Garden to Table

We are excited to be supporting Garden To Table as our school programme this year. Garden to Table is a trust, which runs a gardening and cooking programme in schools across New Zealand. As participants in the Garden to Table programme, seven to 10 year-old children spend time in a productive vege garden and home-style kitchen each week. There they learn skills that will last them a lifetime, and discover just how much fun it is to grow and cook their own seasonal vegetables and fruits.

Tui is providing starter packs to each of the new schools, and seasonal packs during the year.

Read more updates from Garden to Table schools here