The Kitchen-Garden @ Berwick Fields 

 Our students harvested some beautiful sweet chillis yesterday – it seems that Berwick Fielders are very good at growing chillis, they just keep growing and growing and producing beautiful fruit! This harvest weighed in at around 475gms.

As usual we also collected the eggs, washed the eggs and dated the eggs. Part of this process is weighing the eggs to find out the average weight of our eggs for the week – just like you would see on the side of the carton in the supermarket. We are also keeping a graph of this information so that we can see if there are any patterns in our chicken’s egg laying over time.

Earlier this year we began to save the seeds from one amazing radish we grew in 2010. There were SO MANY seeds on that radish that we are STILL working on saving them! This week we have had groups of students relaxing and chatting as they work to save the radish seeds. We have also been using the electronic scales to weigh the seeds and using teaspoons to estimate how many seeds fit in one teaspoon – the answer? Approximately 96!

At the end of last term, groups of students built some ladders for peas to climb and some “bean cages” that will hold up our growing boadbeans when they get too tall to stand up on their own in the wind! They will be please to see that some of our broad beans are growing really well! Unfortunately the peas we planted at the end of last term haven’t popped up – perhaps it was too wet for them. Last week we planted some more peas in their place – hopefully these ones start to shoot up soon!

We’ve also been doing some measuring with the trundle wheels this week too! It’s the first step in making a signpost for our garden that will direct people to key areas of the garden such as the Outdoor Classroom, Hothouse, Orchard, Herb Garden etc. Students used the trundle wheels to measure the distance from the signpost to their given area and measured again to check their accuracy before making a sign from some old recycled fence palings (thanks Mrs Ferguson’s Nanna and Grandy for saving these for us!). Hopefully by next week we will have these signs attached to the signpost – and there’ll be no more excuses for getting lost in the kitchen-garden!