Being the last week of the Tui School Garden Challenge, we needed to make the most of any sunny lunch break that presented itself!
So it was down to the back corner to plant potatoes with mint...
Last year we hemmed our potatoes in with $1 newspaper bundles, a very cost effective retaining system. This year we have moved the still intact newspaper bundles half way back to retain the compost ...a sort of compost rotation where we plant the previous years compost up...
The newspaper bundles are highly recommended, they look like they will last several years largely intact (yes we could still read the pages clearly as if they were new), slowly breaking down over time with the help of bugs and moisture. We are definitely going to use them again, only this time ask the newspaper to reserve some bundles for us. It seems they are catching on around town...could be our Family Grow Fresh Garden Competition in competition with our very selves!
This year we are using pea straw bales to hem in our potatoes, as we hope next week to try planting tomatoes and pumpkins straight into the straw bales. We are hoping that the internal warmth of the decomposing bales will really give our tomatoes and pumpkin plants a great head start!
Here we are evenly laying out our seed potatoes...donated from the bottom of our Head Garden Gnomes potato bin.
This seed potato looked very "brainy"!
Time to sprinkle around a bit of the sponsors product...
...back fill, and wait!
A small cluster of swan plants to attract the right kind of butterfly to our garden to finish off this corner of our garden.
We have used the bird cage we found at the dump to stop the butterfly from laying eggs on our swan plants before they are BIG enough to support LOTS of VERY Hungary caterpillars!
Picking Flowers continues to be a very popular pass time for our Garden Warriors...
...and its actually quite tricky to keep enough flowers growing to satisfy all our cheerful pickers!
Tea tree is as West Coast as white bait and weka's...perfect for a sweet pea... tee pea!
Nice work Garden Warriors, I'm sure this is going to look "Bloomin" lovely by the end of term!
No comments:
Post a Comment