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!