The Kitchen-Garden @ Berwick Fields 

This photograph shows just a tiny amount of the strawberry plants that are flowering all around the Berwick Fields Kitchen Garden – it looks like we will have lots of strawberries to harvest very soon! Over the past weeks we have mulched around the plants to keep the soil moist and the flowers/fruit nice and clean. We have also started to put bird netting over the plants – we have learnt the hard way about how much our local birds love a big, juicy strawberry! 

This week during most of our garden sessions, we have been working hard in the orchard. It’s a lovely place to be at this time of year, with the trees waking up and the first spring blossoms beginning to appear.

We have been removing the weeds and grass from around the base of the trees, fertilising and laying carpet – yes carpet! This is a bit of an experiment – we are not sure if it is going to work, but we are hoping that the pieces of old carpet we have laid around the bottom of the trees (and then covered with mulch) will help to keep the weeds and grass at bay, so we don’t have to do this tricky, hand-hurting job very often. If you have any experience with trying this method or any other methods of keeping the grass/weeds away from trees, perhaps you could send us your advice!

Not much goes to waste in the kitchen-garden. We can find a use for most things, from old couches and old bed ends to old plates and cutlery. Earlier in the term we put a few pre-loved items to good use around the garden and in our outdoor classroom.

Melissa has been busy working with students to create a “wicking garden bed” which is essentially a giant self-watering pot, where the garden bed is designed to draw or ‘wick’ the water up from a reservoir at the bottom. We are hoping this will work really well and be the first of many wicking beds throughout our garden. If so, these will be a great way to minimise water wastage and keep our vegetables watered over the summer. For more info on wicking garden beds, check out this post at Sustainable Gardening Australia.

In August, Berwick Fields had a visit from David Brown – the weatherman of Channel 7 news here in Melbourne. He came to have a look around our school’s Environmental Education programs and our beautiful wetlands area. David also spent quite some time in the kitchen garden and took home some of our freshly harvested broccoli and chillies. You can watch the news clip here:

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Finally, after quite some time now, we have managed to get our new apple-crate garden beds set up. These were sold to us quite cheaply – Thanks Montague Orchards!  They are a great width and height for planting in. They’ve also added a new dimension to the garden, lifting some of our planting areas up off the ground. We have mulched around the bottom of the crates to keep the pathways inbetween them weed and mud free. They look fantastic and we are just starting to get planting in them.  

So far we have planted carrot, coriander, rocket, zucchini, pea and rainbow silverbeet seeds in the apple-crates, but over the coming weeks we will of course plant many other varieties of vegetable seeds and seedlings from the spring planting chart.

We have finally finished out signpost, although I am sure we will add many more signs to it in the future. There are no excuses for getting lost in the garden now, with a sign indicating the direction and even the number of metres to our garden “landmarks”. This was a great measuring activity to do with the students, who used trundle wheels to measure the distance from the sign post to their chosen landmark, before checking their measuring and using markers to make their signs.

It’s been quite a while since we’ve updated the garden blog – sorry! But it’s been quite a while since we had a moment to do so! Hopefully the following posts will update you on (almost) everything that has been happening in 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!

It’s the beginning of a new semester in the Kitchen-Garden, and that means a new bunch of gardeners! Over the last two weeks, our new gardeners have been learning about how a typical session in the garden runs and also going for their garden/wheelbarrow licences! If you would like to know more about our garden/wheelbarrow licences, click here: