Pottering around with DOC

 Just before School finished for the year we were very fortunate to have the lovely Natasha our Local DOC (Department of Conservation) Community Ranger spend the afternoon with us in our school gardens.

 Our Garden Warrior mission was to rescue all the self sown native seedlings in our front gardens, and learn about identifying our native trees in the process...

 Books were consulted for confirmation and advice on growing habitats...

 Pesky wilding Cherry trees were given the heave ho!

Our beautiful Kereru Native Pigeons absolutely adore the berries and new shoots in the spring...thus in the process spreading their favourite spring time food source all around our district!

 We all became rather expert at spotting native seedlings, and were amazed at how many different species had decided to sprout in our gardens...

 Seed sizes, shapes, textures and methods of dispersal were discussed, and seeds were collected for growing!
Remember the easy rule: sow your seeds no more than twice the depth of the size of the seeds (i.e. tiny poppy seeds stay on the surface, bean seeds need to be pushed in to the seed raising mix at least their length in depth!

 

Our seedling foraging complete, it was back to the garden area with our bucket loads of treasure for potting up to grow on!

 Our Tui products, part of our prize package for winning the National Tui School Garden Challenge were put to good use. Natasha showed us the very important tip of drowning our collected seedlings in a buckets of water while they awaited their turn to be potted...keeping those roots saturated and out of the sun and wind is critical to the seedlings on going survival!

 Re-cycled pots form our Garden Gnomes own home gardening efforts were pretty much completely used up...

 Everything got a good soaking as we were going against the grain potting up with the onset of summer ahead of us, we had to keep our potted efforts watered twice a week over the summer break...

 Now that we had potted up over 60 individual seedlings...we needed somewhere out of the heat of summer sun for them to reside...

A HUGE effort Garden Warriors!

THANK YOU Natasha for spending a VERY informative afternoon with us, we all learnt a lot. Some of the native seedlings we found included:

 

Assorted small flax

Ringaringa lilies

Totara trees

Rimu or Kahikatea trees

Cabbage trees

 

As it turns out we really needed these seedlings after the Easter storm, and we plan to collect and pot up another batch this month for on growing...