A wonderful group of youth working with a local garden project entitled, “Roots to Harvest”, came out to Willow Springs Creative Centre to help garden.

They worked to establish a large front garden to show case many of the original plantings formed on the property.

Along the nature path several small shade gardens were made. These will be planted up next spring with native ferns and shade plants.

bookmarks

The beautiful painted tiles were made by the residents and add a nice touch to the gardens.

Above: Community Living residents stand proudly by their raised bed gardens. We covered this garden with plastic mesh to keep the deer from enjoying the harvest.

bookmarks

On a very cold fall day workshop participants learned about pruning through a hands on session using Willow Springs Creative Centre’s old apple trees as examples.

Above: Willow Springs Apple Tree gets some much needed care.

bookmarks

Willow Springs was asked to provide gardening programmng to the EcoLiteracy Summer Camp.

We taught the children to make twig planters using a tincan, 2 elastic bands, a handful of twigs and some raffia. They planted up herbs to take home. We also played a seed identification game, learned to rad seed packages and we planted vegetables in the Lakehead University Community Garden.

Above: These are some of the twig planters that children made while enjoying their week long EcoLiteracy Summer Camp at Willow Springs.

bookmarks

The children were attending our Early Ages Art Camp for a week. The camp included anicent art activities such as felt making, willow furniture making, batiking, cropper & day work.

Pieces of their artwork were displayed through our garden and native trail at the end of camp.

Above: Children enjoy an unexpected visitor at Willow Springs

bookmarks

Our vegtable crop from our raised beds were very tasty. The salad crops were delicious. We were amazed to harvest even potatoes from the raised beds. The soil was mounded up each week to allow for the hill of spuds to grow successfully.

bookmarks

The latest East Wheeling Community Gardens article, written by the gardeners, was just published in the local newspaper! Read on…

With the arrival of December, and the unmistakable onset of winter weather, there still has been no slowdown in the activities of the East Wheeling Community Gardens.   Residents of East Wheeling are hard at work with the unique garden projects that are not put on hold for cold weather, but rather are synchronized with the changing seasons.

A walk down 18^th St. would hardly betray the approach of Christmas. The East Wheeling Kids’ Garden is still providing a plentiful fall vegetable crop, consisting of kale, lettuce, cabbage, and other cold-hardy plants. The combination of heavy winter mulching and the warmth from the highway that looms over the garden offers protection for the crop on cold nights.

The young gardeners were able to provide fresh, organic greens and herbs to ten families for Thanksgiving, and hope to do so again for Christmas. One East Wheeling family expressed their surprise: “Who knew greens would still be rolling in, even with snow on the ground?”

And it certainly has been a joyful experience for the gardeners, as the opportunity of sharing the bounty of fresh, nutritious foods is especially gratifying during the holiday seasons. This spirit of sharing and coming together has been a theme of the community gardens since the beginning. “The gardens create a chance for people to come together, talk as a community, and get to know one another,” says gardener Neal Bledsoe. “It draws people out who usually don’t get out of the house, and involves them in something positive.”

Meanwhile, children at the Laughlin Chapel in East Wheeling have been working on a related “back to the earth” project, namely the first East Wheeling Chicken Coop.  An educational activity that teaches the responsibilities of animal care and husbandry, the chicken coop project blends learning with the rewards of good nutrition from well-tended animals and the start-to-finish satisfaction of overall accomplishment. The children have taken ownership of the project, picking out the design and pitching in with the construction process.

And to round out the winter activities, East Wheelingers are pulling together to design and build the first ever Community Greenhouse. With this added resource, the gardeners will be able to expand their goals of community education, beautification, and food production. The gardens will have a reliable source of organic seedlings, both for their own planting and for fundraising purposes.

“With this greenhouse, we’re jumping over a hurdle,” declared avid community gardener Regina Martin.  “Once we get over that hurdle, we’re going to have victory.  It’s going to be our crown jewel. We’ll always remember what we started here… how we started it.” 

            “We’re trying to create environmentally safe, good nutritious food,” Ms. Martin continued.  “Coming out of our own gardens, to help clean up the community, sending it in a positive direction.”

             “We’re excited about having kids working in it,” she added, “providing new hope for the children and the adults.”

bookmarks

This is the fun part now the hardest of the work is complete. We are just doing a little weeding here and there and keeping the water up to the plants. Have a look at how well our chickens are producing; we are selling the eggs to families and friends of the school. The tomatoes are climbing quite fast, they need to be tied up regularly and we are feeding the weeds to our happy hens.

We have entered the Junior Landcare’s ‘Pumpkin Challenge’ which is a competition for young people to enter to determine who can grow the biggest pumpkin in Australia.  The seeds were provided for us, they are the Atlantic Giant variety which are orange and grow very large if given the right conditions.  We prepared the soil with plenty of horse manure in a raised garden bed. We will be required to report the growth size of our competition pumpkin on a web site over the coming months.

bookmarks

After much deliberation, and some interesting suggestions. We have now officially named our garden sites- the Original site is now known as ‘ the secret garden’ to denote its slightly hidden location and the new site is being called ‘the orchard’ to help us visualise its future destiny. The planter boxes around the Aro Valley community center and park as known as…..’the park’…lets not make these things complicated

As spring really sets in and summer approaches, many of the plants we initially planted in the  secret garden are beginning to flower and set seed, kale, broadbeans, silverbeet, brocolli etc. So at out last working bee wew had a real puch to harvest as much as we could and remove any plants which were using space inefficiently -  We had to make room for the large new load of plant we picked recently picked up (thanks again Fiskars and Mitre 10!). The Secret garden is now home to, amongst other things: Sweet corn, more currents, chives and peas.

Some great hardy perenials also made their way into the aro valley park planter boxes - camomile, rosemary, sage and some more obscure things you can see in the photos. We had a real puch to plamt things that did not need to much water, as we have not quite clarified how our gardens will survive over the inevitable Aro Valley summer holiday exodus.

Thanks to Bark Ltd and Wellington City Council Parks and Gardens we have a great mountain of mulch turning into compost, so we also spread this liberally around the newly planted beds to help them retain moisture.  The initial mountain we had in the orchard is gradually dwindling.

We will be having one more planning meetin for 09, at which we will finalise our tree order for the orchard…gotta be in early to get the specimens we want, clarify who will be around to water the gardens and make some tentative plans for what should be an awesome year in 2010…. exciting.

Bruce from Fiskars has also been back in touch and discussions are underway about our official opening ceremony…more soon

bookmarks

Our plaque arrives

There was much excitement in our classroom yesterday when a very, very , heavy parcel arrived in the mail. It was our amazing wicked, watery, wiggly worm garden wock plaque. It goes beautifully in front of our garden. we have been eating peas, strawberries, blueberries and other students have been using our herbs in their cooking class. Since our opening the garden has grown heaps and we have planted lots of new seedlings. Now it is getting hotter we are busy watering and weeding, we hope to get a rainwater tank soon.

bookmarks