Spud in a Bucket Results

Yesterday was weigh-in day and of the 80 buckets sold, 41 were returned for the judging!

Overall the plants looked small, and this may well have accounted for the less than expected turn out, however the proof would be in what lay beneath!

The Green team leaders from Room 10, Hanna, Sean and Amber, weighed and counted potatoes from each bucket.

The competition was close, however the following two entries each won a family meal (leg of lamb, spring carrots, cauliflower and/or chocolates) to go with their potaoes:

Heaviest Crop -Chris North (Ngaire's Dad Room 7)

Most Potatoes- Serena Boeyen-Stowers Room 9

Chocolates went to the following winners:

Orana Park Award(Potatoes Look Like Animals) Mrs Holland

Potato Most Resembling a Bottom (this replaced the Most Romantic category as there were no entries!)-Daniel Hawkey D'aeth Room 7

The Best Decorated Bucket (As judged by Mr Wood!)- Shiann Scobie Room 8

Congratulations to all the winners and thank you to all those who had a go!

A huge thank you to Bunnings who had supplied us with the seed potatoes and buckets and therefore allowed us to spend up on the prizes! Rose and Penny met up with our winners and also had some Bill and Bruce Bunning's teddys for those who entered.

Next year we intend to start earlier and will be quizzing Chris and Serena on their secrets!

Official Opening of the Addington Potting Shed

On Tuesday the Green Team officially opened the freshly built potting shed. Designed and built by our lovely caretaker Vic Phillips with the help of Michael, Jakaia, Souvichea, Josh, Daniel and Seamus, the shed will be used to sow, and plant out material for around the school.

Ms Heath formally cut the ribbon with secateurs and we tried to fit as many Green team members as possible, into the shed! Thank you Vic and team for all your hard work. Time to get sowing!

Greening Spaces

Last week the children of Addington school, staff and friends of the school planted out 250 flowering plants, and sprinkled wildflower seeds on part of an empty site on Selwyn St. The row of shops had all been removed after damage during the earthquakes. With the land owners permission and as part of Greening Spaces, the children had spread compost the previous day and then were able to walk down from school class by class to each put in a plant. A path was put in to allow access to the road crossing, and the children used the rubble on the site to mark out the garden area. The children had a ball and were very enthusiastic planters! Everyone got stuck in. Passersby would stop and add their encouragement, some were reduced to tears, they were so happy to see the children working at making a difference. Many cars waved and tooted their encouragement. It was a very special day. If you get a chance, go past to have a look at this piece of magic!

Greening Spaces is an organisation that allows schools in Christchurch to bring colour to sites in their neighbourhood. Andrew Drummond is the coordinator and with the help of Meadow Mushrooms, Frews Transport, and the people of Ashburton, has been able to work with schools on several sites around the city. The flowering plants for the Selwyn St site are from the same people as the hanging baskets in the new Pop Up Mall in town and look fantastic!

University Team Adds to the Green Team

A new raised vegetable bed and four fruit trees have magically appeared in our gardens over the last few weeks! This was the work of Mark Meaclem and fellow students from the University of Canterbury Management department. Mark and his team, Dave, Jarrod, Dea, and John are doing a paper called Principles of Leadership and as part of the course, have to design a community project. They chose Addington school and expanding our garden area as their project. The team had a budget and sourced some of their materials from Oderings Nursery.

On Friday afternoons, the team have come in and worked with our children planning, building the bed, and planting trees. Last Friday, Mark, his team, and the Green Team planted out the new bed with potatoes, and weeded and put onions, cabbage and spinach in the existing beds. It was a great team effort. A concrete pad was prepared and the children left their hand prints and initials there for future generations to look at!

A huge thank you to Mark, Dave, Jarrod, Dea, John for the wonderful work they have done! The beds and fruit trees look amazing and have added a wonderful new dimension to our garden area. The children thoroughly enjoyed working with you, and especially learning the carpentry and concrete making skills. Thank you for your patience!!! Watched concrete never sets!!!

Potatoes in a Bucket Competition

In an effort to raise more money for our native garden and specifically raise funds to build a concrete path to allow access into the garden for all our children, we are running a potato in a bucket competition! Entries for this have now closed and with almost 80 buckets ordered the competition is going to be hot! It would seem that many inter and intra family competitions are also underway, and there have been hushed potato growing conversations in some corners of the staff room!

A huge thank you to our friends Rose and Penny and the team at Bunnings Riccarton who have kindly donated not only the buckets, but also all the Jersey Benne seed potatoes!! Fantastic ! Thank you Bunnings Riccarton!
As some of the teachers have ordered a bucket for their classroom, we will be able to follow the growing progress of a plant on this blog.

Native Planting Underway

Today four children from Room 7 planted out 10 of the first trees to go into our new native garden. Seamus, Miracle, Serenity and Josh dug the holes and planted out the totara trees. The trees will form a boundary hedge down one end of the garden. During their digging they discovered treasures including old bits of pathway, ‘prehistoric’ tree roots, and an eraser that must be ‘from children that went to school 50 years ago. Was Ms Heath here then?”. Great fun! A huge thank you to the Christchurch City Council who donated the Trees for Canterbury(TFC) voucher that enabled us to get the first of our many plants.

As well as the totara, we were able to buy 5 matai, and then TFC donated 15 lancewood seedlings. We hope to plant these out soon once the planting plan is finalised. It is all very exciting!

Worm Farms Underway and Future Kowhai Forest Sown!

Yahhh! We have finally achieved one of our goals set last year and with the help of Rose, Grant, Errol (and Carlin the Seeing-Eye-Dog) from Bunnings, we have our worm farm, and another one, all set up and in place.

On the Wednesday afternoon, before the snow, Rose and her team, taught the Green Team leaders how to put together the layers of a worm farm, using coconut fibre, then the worms, and then the damp shredded newspaper. Grant demonstrated the layering process, while Errol explained the purpose of each step.
On the Friday we added the first small handful of food scraps.
The children learnt that some scraps such as orange peels, bread, meat and dairy can not be added. Some foods take a long time to break down and may start to mould off and smell bad! (We don’t want that as both farms are wintering in a work room!!!!)

Bunnings very kindly donated a worm farm box, two bags of worms, and some coconut fibre to get us started.
So its all go!!!
The next project was the sowing of kowhai seeds! The children filled yoghurt pottles with seed raising mix and planted their seed. The pottles will sit in their classrooms and should germinate in the next few weeks. We will then have a lovely kowhai forest to plant out next year, once the plants are big enough!! That mass of yellow is going to look fantastic!

Thank you again to Bunnings for donating the seeds and mix to get this started, and for allowing Rose, Grant and Errol to spend the time with us. We really appreciate the wonderful contribution you are making to our school environment, and our sustainability goals.

Peastraw Frenzy!

OK this must be a world record!!!
At the end of last term, 10 children and 4 adults took one hour to spread 5 cubic metres of compost/soil mix and spread 50 bales of peastraw. Phew!! Incredible!! There will have been some tired children (and teacher aides) that night. Very keen Green Team!!!
Thank you to Graeme Woods and Vic Philips, (our new caretaker), for all their hard work and for getting the soil spreading underway before the children came out. It was a great team effort.

Our native area is all ready for planting out this term!!

Bunnings to the rescue with Compost

A huge thank you to Bunnings in Riccarton who donated 5 cubic metres of compost/soil mix for our native garden!!

We will be working alongside Rose, Penny and the Bunnings team next term, as they help us finally get our worm farm underway, and help us with the propagation of native seeds. Addington is on their “Schools for Sustainability” programme. We are looking forward to working with you!

Thank you again Rose and her team for the wonderful soil mix. This will get our new plants off to a great start!

Walnut Bagging Factory

Yesterday and today Green team members have been busy bagging the walnuts that they collected furiously two months ago! The plan is to bag them all in two kilogram amounts and then sell them this Friday. The team have also made wonderful signs for our stall.

We will also sell a bit of silverbeet and parsley from the garden. Any money made will go towards more plants and seeds for our school gardens.

Cosy Vege Garden

The Green team has been busy cleaning up and tidying up various parts of the school garden.
Yesterday lunch time, the children from the junior classes harvested the last of the potatoes. Leek and potato soup is on the menu for next week. Yummy!
The children also spread compost over the vege beds, making the leeks, silverbeet, cabbage and bok choi cosy for the winter! More peastraw managed to make its way onto the grass, than the garden beds, but was soon raked into the right place!
Broad beans were sown for a delicious spring feast.

The Green team, and Vic Philips, (our new school caretaker) continue to spread leaves and grass clippings over the area for our new native tree zone. Pea straw for this area is still to come.

Native Area Work Begins

Recently the Green team started clearing up along the Brougham St boundary and down the adjacent fence line as they began work on the area to be planted out in natives trees and shrubs over the next few months.

Children were busy raking up the leaves and mown grass to use as mulch for the ground area to be planted. John Moore, a friend of the school and member of the Lions organisation, who has put together our planting plan spent time cutting back some of the existing trees. These were planted 30 years ago and in real need of some attention.

Now that John has marked out the planting area, the Green team will spread more mulch and some of our own compost, and then pea straw over the lot so that we are already to start planting. Very exciting!! Jack Elphick came down to school to visit the Green team and see where his seedlings will be going.

Once the pea straw goes down, and the boundary is marked out with posts shall start the exciting job of planting.

The Christchurch City Council recently granted us $150.00 worth of plants from Trees for Canterbury. We look forward to going there to choose our plants in the next few weeks.

It is all coming together beautifully!!

Seedlings For Native Revamp!

Today Hanna and Sean, Green Team leaders from Room 10, visited with Jack Elphick to look at the plants he has propagated and now offered to the school.

Jack who lives locally has been very active in environmental issues, both in New Zealand and overseas. He has worked in South America and was involved at Muraroa, protesting against nuclear testing in the Pacific. More recently Jack was doing volunteer work for DOC propagating native plants on Mana Island.

Jack, who has been very busy has offered us wineberry, ake ake, cabbage trees and kanuka seedlings for our revamping of the school's native area. The Green team plan to pick these up early next term, and put them into an area near the compost heaps to grow on until we are ready to plant them out. A huge thank you to Jack for his wonderful offer.

Cauliflower Soup for Room 7

Today Room 7 created and consumed curried cauliflower soup! At morning tea, Olivia, Dan, Sam, Kahu and Ngaire , chopped onions, cauliflower(harvested from Friday), and saute'd it all in butter and curry powder. Next they added chicken stock, water and the soup cooked until everything was soft. The staff room smelt devine, and many of the staff passing through stared longingly into the cooking pot, hoping for a try of the left overs! But it was not to be.

The mixture was then whizzed up, milk and flour added ( to thicken slightly), and served up at lunch time.

All but two members of the class were keen to try the soup, and second and third helpings were soon being served up! The pot was soon empty!

Well done Room 7. What great risk takers! Lovely new flavours to try at home.

Catch Up

Today we were busy with a bit of a clean and tidy up of some of the gardens in front of the senior classrooms. The Green team members of Rooms 10 and 11 weeded the beds outside their rooms, while Room 9 members weeded some of the vegetable garden and put fresh compost in the beds outside Room 4. The Juniors are planning to plant up their beds over the winter!

After lunch Mrs Douglas and her lovely Room 7 Juniors came out to weed more of the vegetable garden. Hannah and Sean from Room 10 demonstrated how the compost collection system turned food scraps into wonderful growing material.

Room 7 harvested cauliflowers, cabbages, tomatoes, beans, and the odd strawberry!

I think there will be a wee feast had early next week.!!

Art Attack 2011 'The Addington Market'

This year we got together with the First Language Group to create 'The Addington Market'. We hope you enjoy our creation.

2011 Starts with a Bean Feast!!!

Another year, and the new Green team for 2011 kicked off with a bean harvest and feast! Our beans had grown well over the holidays thanks to Emily Rose, Hazel and their Mum who kindly kept up the watering. Everything is looking great!

Last Friday some of the senior school Green teamers, picked and then cooked up the beans for a feast at lunch time. We compared the taste of raw and cooked beans, and there were fans of both!

Green Team membership in the Senior school has rocketed to 64!!!! The Junior school has yet to sign up, however numbers are expected to be just as high. That would mean over half the school is now part of the Green Team! Fantastic!

So... this will mean a new way of managing our projects, and will probably involve each class taking turns to help out in particular areas, and on certain projects. This is going to be a wonderful year with so many children involved.