Garden of Edendale

December 1st 2011 – Visit from Room 16

December 1, 2011 · Filed under 2011, December

First day of summer and a lovely day in the orchard today, 4 mums, 2 pre-schoolers and over 20 excited year 1 kids from Room 16, with their teacher Miss Hatanaka. We did some weeding as ever and mulching, but mostly spent our morning showing the kids around the orchard split into 4 groups. Fantastic to be able to show them so many trees just moving from flower to early fruiting stage – lemons, mandarins, chilean guava berries, apples, grapes, avocadoes, passion fruit, blueberries and feijoas.

The kids were all very keen to discuss the bunch of bananas they had seen at assembly and I heard they all had to guess the number of fruit on the bunch. The winning guess from Room 21 was 202 bananas. This means they get the first taste when they finally ripen. Hope they are ripe before christmas.

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22nd November 2011 – Avocados and Grapes

November 21, 2011 · Filed under 2011, november

Last Thursday we discovered we have many many tiny avocados growing for the first time in our orchard. Amazing!! Wonderful!! It is always exciting (for me at least) to see the first fruit growing from any of our trees. The first year it is important to pull off all the little fruit before they grow to give the tree a chance to put all its energy into developing strong roots. This is hard and really feels wrong when the reason you plant the tree is to get the fruit in the first place. Year 2 is usually a small taste of what is to come with fruit production. But never enough to satisfy the impatient person who planted the tree and has spent so much time dutifully watering / weeding / mulching etc. So to get to year 3 and finally see literally the fruits of your labours is an exciting time. Avocadoes are a bit different, usually taking longer to get established and much longer to produce fruit. It is not uncommon to be waiting seven years or more and some trees never produce fruit at all. My neighbours just chopped down a huge avocado tree which has never fruited.

So to see our avocado trees with lots of tiny fruit after only 2 years in the ground is fantastic, but there is a reason they have fruited so early and it is because, on the advice of a very nice man called Hooshang who is an expert avocado grower who lives on the North Shore, we planted 3 trees very close together and made sure they were a mix of A and B pollinators. Our trees are Ettinger (B), Hashimoto (B) and Hass (A). They have all been flowering at the same time over the last few weeks, so obviously the combination has worked well.

The plan with these trees is to let them grow into each other but not to let them get too big, so we will prune them after fruiting, and keep them about head height. If you are interested in any more avocado information Hooshang has a website with plenty of informative links http://www.avopro.org/mini-avo-trees/

Secondly, as if that was not exciting enough, we have hundreds of little bunches of grapes growing all over the pool fence, which i suspect we will soon have to net to protect from birds. We have 3 grape vines and they are all Albany Surprise i think. Better go check the labels

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10th November 2011 – Harvesting Bananas

November 10, 2011 · Filed under 2011, november · Tagged bananas

The bananas on our misi luki tree have all filled out over the last few weeks and are looking a little less green so it was time to get them down today as bananas are supposed to ripen off the tree in a cool dark place. The mother plant is pretty high so we were glad it was planted near the bank so we could use this to our advantage. Jodie and Sanj stood on the bank and pulled the hand of bananas towards them so I could cut them off the tree with a saw. Heather came to help and took photos and Rosemary came to see what we were up to also. Then we had to cut down the tree that had fruited as they only fruit once. This tree has many pups or daughters (i have seen them called both) around her so hopefully they will also fruit for us. For 24 hours the bananas will be in a plastic bag with one already ripe banana to encourage the ripening process to get going. After this we will keep them out of the bag but still in the shed until they are ripe enough to eat. There could be almost 200 bananas altogether! Great to finally have that job done and no-one injured. It was actually easier than i was expecting.

Apart from that, the orchard is looking beautiful at the moment – apple trees are blossoming as are the citrus, avocados, feijoas and passionfruit, plus the wildflowers have self seeded and we have a sea of orange poppies dotted with cornflowers and blue tansy. The grapevines are covered in tiny bunches of grapes, blueberry bushes have lots of berries and we have the first few loquats ripening on the tree. I have to say it is the first time i can remember that we seem to be ahead of ourselves in our little oasis. All the trees are fed and mulched, pruning happened over winter, no weird and puzzling bugs are munching the life out of anything at the moment. Often i look around and see job after job that needs doing but this week, now the bananas are harvested , it is lovely to sit and appreciate what we have all created over the last few years. It’s a beautiful place. I hope you will take the time to go and enjoy it.

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September 30th 2011

September 29, 2011 · Filed under 2011, September

Well I’m a bit behind the times with this post but better late than never apparently so off we go. On august 10th we had two visitors to the orchard Finn Mackesy and Jo McIntyre-Brown who work for the council as Environmental Education Advisors. Finn has visited us before, two and a half years ago he helped me organise which tree goes where in our orchard in the days when i was a gardening novice and knew very little about the many fruit trees i had volunteered to be in charge of. I was ridiculously grateful for his advice. He also donated and helped to plant the sugarcane and our beautiful banana trees, so it was great that he came when the biggest tree was fruiting.

Finn and Jo were keen to meet Rosemary, our principal and were keen to help our school with any environmental initiatives which is great. I would like to say thanks to Finn and Jo for taking the time to visit Edendale School.:-)

On August 25th we planted the last 3 of our donated trees from the Mt Eden Village People Citrus in Schools Project. It was such torrential rain on our working bee that we didn’t quite get to finish. The last trees were a kaffir lime a mandarin and a meyer lemon. All of them have been planted in front of Rosemarys office, where our new sensory garden is taking shape. We also planted a coffee tree (actually, is it a tree? or a bush? I’ll have to look that up) kindly donated to us by Brian Coleman. All these trees are in half wine barrels except for the meyer lemon which is in the ground. Here are the photos:

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August 22nd 2011

August 22, 2011 · Filed under 2011, August

Well we have 15 new citrus trees since I last posted on the blog, all donated by the Citrus in Schools project. We have now have:

Oranges:
Washington navel x 2
Harwood Late x 2
Best seedless x 2

Mandarins:
Aoshima x 1
Kawano x 1
Burgess scarlet x 1

Lemons:
Lemonade x 2
Meyer x 2

Limes:
Tahitian x 1
Kaffir x 1

Before their arrival we had to buy 15 stakes, write the names of the trees on each stake, find a good site for it around school and then get approval from Rosemary. This happened on Thursday 4th and Friday 5th of August. Also on the 5th we had organised plenty of compost and Garden mix from Kings Plant Barn. They were kind enough to donate 8 bags of compost for free, which is fantastic – Thanks to Simon at Kings, St Lukes for this. It is lovely to get free trees but can get quite costly when buying stakes and compost and netting to protect them from the footballs so it’s great to save where ever we can.

Our working bee was Sunday August 7th and we had an amazing turnout, the best ever i think, about 14 people plus numerous kids. We arrived to the wonderful sight of a large hole dug by every stake we had put in the ground – at first nobody knew who had spent their sunday morning digging for us but, we found out that it was Sanj and Keith and their 3 girls, Lauren, Heather and Sophie - I have already said thank you in person but Sanj and Keith – here is your big public THANK YOU!!!!! You have no idea how grateful we all were to have the whole job made quicker because after the first hour the rain came down in torrents and I don’t think we could have been any wetter. Not the best tree planting weather.

Anyway, we got 12 trees in the ground in 2 hours. 3 others are going into half wine barrels outside Rosemary’s office so we can do those later. Here are some photos of us first dry and then getting very wet.

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June 30th 2011 – The New Shed

June 30, 2011 · Filed under 2011, June

Our new orchard shed, donated by Hamish Stewart Catering, has been fully assembled and in use for the last couple of weeks which is very exciting. More exciting than you can imagine actually because getting it has proved to be a mission for myself and Lloyd, our Caretaker.

It was paid for months ago but arrived damaged by the courier company and no-one seemed very bothered when we rang to tell them and the company we bought from. This took ages to get sorted and then when Lloyd tried to assemble the shed, the roof did not fit!! The company were not very bothered about that either. I won’t mention who we got it from as they have recently sold the business and it would not be fair to the new owners but suffice to say we won’t be dealing with any of them again. Thanks to Lloyd and a bit of woodwork magic the shed is now finally functional and not having to carry all our gear down to the orchard is great. We also used it to shelter from the rain at our last working bee, so it has many uses. A BIG THANK YOU to Hamish for giving us the money for the shed!!

The last few working bees have been a bit hit and miss with heavy rain stopping play on a couple of occasions but in general we still have up to 5 hardy souls who come down to the orchard on Thursday afternoons before school pickup to weed and mulch and check our trees. Today one of our regulars, Jodie Little is spraying our trees with copper. This is an organic method to prevent many fungal diseases on fruit trees and this is the time of year to spray all dormant deciduous fruit trees and citrus that are not bearing fruit. We have had to pick a day with good weather or the rain just washes it off.

Here’s a few pics of our new shed and the orchard in winter 2011:

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June 30th, 2011 – The Banana tree

June 30, 2011 · Filed under 2011, June

Apparently June equals winter, but there has not been much sign of it in Auckland this year. It’s a little chilly but hardly freezing cold and as i type there is a beautiful blue sky outside.

So, because our bananas were fruiting in winter we bagged them up to protect them from the cold, or at least Lloyd the lovely caretaker did, it was a bit high for the rest of us. Great, job done I thought, but then as warm day followed warm day I began to wonder if the bunch of bananas were just rotting inside their steamy home. So last week we removed the bag and I was relieved to see our first (and thus most precious) bananas were still looking mighty fine. Not exactly sure whether to bag or not at the moment, but we are learning as we go I guess so time will tell.

As for when to harvest, well I have googled this and found twenty different answers, so if anyone knows then you had better leave a comment! What I can gather is that the fruit takes at least 2 months to ripen and you have to pick them green IF you see they are starting to split, or if they are being eaten by animals / birds / insects. Otherwise it’s ok to leave for a bit longer. We need to wait until the bananas are looking more rounded and filled out rather than square looking as they do now.

When it’s time to cut the bunch down we have to cut at least 30 cms above the bunch and then cut down that particular tree as they only fruit once. This tree has put out many new suckers so we have plenty more bananas to come. To ripen fully, we leave the bunch hanging for a while, some info says in a cool dark space, some says in the sun, so will need to investigate further.

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May 3rd 2011

May 5, 2011 · Filed under 2011, may

We came back from the easter holidays this week to find about 40 – 50 beautiful big Wiki Tu feijoas and a few Appollos aswell, all laying ripe on the ground and unmolested by the insects. So into a bag they went and Mr Coleman’s class were the lucky recipients this week.

Hopefully it won’t be too long before we start making more use of our produce through cooking classes because after lots of meetings and talking and waiting we are finally officially involved with the Garden to Table programme, which is great news for our school. If you want to know more about this, they have a website here.

We did apply to be one of the fully funded schools, which would have meant having specialist staff for cooking and gardening classes and also money for infrastructure development. We didn’t get to be fully funded (we might next year) but they have funded us into their subscription programme which gives us project officer support, implementation manuals, training and professional development and access to sponsors. This will help us get started with the programme. They will help us find more volunteers and mid May a trainer come over from Melbourne to run workshops on program implementation, curriculum integration, kitchen and garden lesson planning and a team building session for teachers as well as a networking dinner for principals.

So that’s lots of good stuff to help our teachers and kids involve our edible gardens into their lessons. We have two teachers currently organising the gardening and cooking programmes; Natalie Hick (who teaches Special Needs) is doing the gardening and Michael Bell (who teaches Year 2, Team Kabila, Room 11) is going to be doing the cooking side of things as I believe he was a chef in another life, and therefore perfect for the job.

This morning in the orchard we set to more weeding and mulching. We are always short of mulch and so generally apply it thinly to cover a greater area, but today we started putting a good 10cm layer over certain areas to try and keep the weeds down a bit better. I need to find more mulch so if anyone reading knows where we can can get more – ideally it would be donated – then please let me know.

Our bananas are growing well so I’ll finish with a few pics of them, plus the blueberries we transplanted a few weeks ago.

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April 14th 2011

April 14, 2011 · Filed under 2011, April

Mucho excitement on our weekly thursday morning in the orchard with the first appearance of fruit on our Misi Luki banana tree. Two weeks ago we saw a beautiful red flower appear, which has increased in size quite dramatically, and today the petals had opened just enough for us to see the baby bananas. The obligatary picture will be posted below. From my recent reading on our banana tree I see that this tree is a good cultivar for our Auckland climate and is hardy and disease resistant. Just what we need in our low maintenance plan. This type of banana comes from Samoa, has fruit that can hang in bunches of 200 or more and can weigh over to 20 kilos at harvest!! Amazing production from one tree. We would then need just 3 – 4 trees to feed one banana to every child in our school.

Apparently bananas have no particular fruiting season, they just begin to fruit when the tree has around 42 leaves and is about 20 months old, so if the fruit appear in autumn, as ours have, the following colder weather may stop the fruit developing. To try and help with this problem it is good to surround the new banana bunches with a bag of some sort, just to keep it a bit warmer. So if you see us half way up the tree wrestling with a bag, you will know what we are up to, rather than assuming the volunteers have all gone barmy.

We have plenty of baby banana trees still growing (the pups from the original) so more fruit will follow if this first bunch does not last the winter.

Other trees curently producing for us are the feijoas. The early season Unique variety is just about finished but we now have the mid season Appollo fruiting and also the late season Wiki Tu. The latter has enormous fruit, which can reach avocado size.

The ballerina apple trees are also giving us their first little crop. It’s great to see the trees producing after the first year of very little fruit, and hard to imagine that in future years we will probably have plenty to eat, cook and sell too. I also think that in the future no-one will get quite as excited about the fruit on our trees as our group of volunteers do right now, simply because there are lots of ‘firsts’. The Edendale orchard is a lovely place to be on a thursday morning, a lovely group of people doing rewarding work. We are always keen to welcome new volunteers from our community so come and join us if you can spare an hour or so from 9am. Now, behold, the bananas…..

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Autumn 2011

March 10, 2011 · Filed under 2011, march

March is upon us already and the last few weeks has seen us harvest our first decent crop of fruit in our orchard…… a drumroll for our amazing passionfruit vines! We have had working bees every thursday morning of term 1 and it has been wonderful to have had classes of children coming down to look around every week and walk away with a passion fruit each. And also a passion for fruit maybe? Ok it’s a bit early for that but I couldn’t resist.

Also fruiting in abundance are the chilean guava berries. Hundreds of them all along the hedge. They are amazingly hardy plants. Half of them get great sun, half get lots of shade, yet they are all looking equally healthy and fruiting well. Lots of the kids have sampled these and it’s fair to say no-one has seen them before. We plan to harvest them all soon and have a session making chilean guava berry jelly. I found a couple of links about them, one for a jelly recipe and one with lots more info on these berries such as the fact that they were Queen Victorias favourite fruit and she had them grown in Cornwall (better climate!) and sent to London.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/13/how-grow-cook-chilean-guava
http://www.edible.co.nz/recipes.php?fruitid=18

All the trees are pretty healthy at the moment, we have feijoas all looking good and the first loquats are beginning to grow, they won’t be ready until september, one of the few fruits around at that time of year. The banana tres are enormous, but can’t see any fruit growing on them yet. The ballerina apple trees are all fruiting. Not sure when we harvest them so that will be my next reading probably. We did have some grapes growing too but all the little bunches have mysteriously disappeared… small fingers have been busy maybe? Hopefully next year we will have so many we can lose a few and not even notice.

We are still in the application process for the Garden to Table programme, another meeting next week, so will keep you posted on the outcome. Good things take time…..:-)