Spring

It was great to come back to school and see how well our vegetables have been growing during the holidays – our broad beans have formed already, our kale and spring onions are growing well and we had cauliflowers, silverbeet and lots of snow peas to harvest.

 

Alexander harvests cauliflower

Patrick harvested silverbeet and also the tops of the broad beans

 

 

The poly tunnel

Our new garden is developing well too – our hot house, chicken house and poly tunnel are currently being erected and our fruit trees have lots of blossom.

Hot house

The Chook House and the Posts to Fence off The Chook Run

 

 

Poly Tunnel

Hot House

Fruit Trees

 

Chook House

 



In our existing garden we have been working on preparing our raised beds for planting. We have been growing 'green manure crops' (as explained in a previous post) to enrich the soil. The crops were ready to be cut down and dug back into the soil this week. Abbie and Riley did a great job with this.

 

Our   delicious food this week consisted of:

Wholemeal rolls

Skordalia (Greek Potato and Garlic Dip)

Hummus

Cauliflower and Carrot Gratin

Pasta with a Spinach and Ricotta Sauce

Crudities (raw vegetables to have with the dip)

Salad of the Imagination

 

We are attracting quite a lot of publicity at the moment – an article about our program has been published on the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation web-site – take a look by going to http://www.kitchengardenfoundation.org.au/ and clicking on ‘Southern Support School’s Kitchen Garden Program Flourishes’ – there will also be a feature about us in their Spring Newsletter which is due out shortly. And yesterday a reporter from ‘Eat Well Tasmania’ spent the morning working with Blue and White Classes during their kitchen and garden sessions – they will be writing about us in their newsletter and also plan to include a report about us (including videos) on their web-site.

 

We sold out of recipe books again this week, but more will be available early next week – they cost $10 and can be obtained from the front office or by sending a note in to us.

 

Next week we are cooking:

Wholemeal rolls

Carrot and Cumin Dip

Cheesy Mashed Potato Bake

Pasta with a Spring Vegetable Sauce

Silver beet and feta rolls

Salad of the Imagination

 Some more photos:

Litiani puts her apron on

Regan chops parsley

Great Group Work

Rochelle pours the cheese sauce onto the cauliflower and carrots

Rochelle spreads the cheese sauce
 

Hugo makes the cheese sauce

 

Jodh makes bread rolls



Cameron makes pasta

Josh adds some pepper to the skordalia



Ellen holds the spoon while Ryan measures out the oil

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We started this week with our first wet gardening day. Some of our students stayed in class and started to work on their kitchen and garden journals; others started to make a mosaic table. We have an old table in our shed and plan to decorate it with mosaic tiles.
The weather brightened by Monday afternoon and Red and Orange Classes were able to come down to the garden. Everyone was very excited to see how much our plants have grown over the Easter break. Jed was especially pleased to discover that the corn has ripened!

We harvested a wide variety of vegetables for cooking this week:

• green tomatoes
• cabbage
• basil
• tomatoes
• capsicum
• corn
• parsley

As well as harvesting we did the following:

• planting carrot seeds
• weeding
• removing dead plants
• composting
• paper shredding (for the compost)
• watering
• feeding the worms in our worm farm

Nick harvests a cabbage for coleslaw



Jackson harvested a cabbage for coleslaw

Regan harvested green tomatoes

And a third cabbage was harvested by Nick for coleslaw

Billy shredded paper for our compost heap

Jo and Billy (that's Billy behind the paper!!) put the shredded paper onto the compost heap

Shannon discovered that the sweet corn has ripened

Litiani inspected the harvest table

Patrick enjoyed using the food processor to shred vegetables for the coleslaw

Litiani making coleslaw

H

Liam whisked eggs for frittata

R

Stevan made ravioli

Darcy made mini frittatas and carried them very carefully to the oven

Rochelle made mini frittatas

Ryan cooked fried green tomatoes

Ryan enjoyed his fried green tomatoes!



Hugo cracked eggs for frittata

Rochelle cracked eggs for frittata



Our menu this week was:

Fried Green Tomatoes with Yoghurt

Coleslaw

Pizza Scrolls

Mini Frittatas

Pumpkin Ravioli

 As usual everyone enjoyed most of the food. Green tomatoes were a 'first' for just about all of us and we were pleasantly surprised by their delicious taste. The filling for the ravioli was particularly tasty - we think we might use the same recipe for a dip later on.

This was our first week of making ravioli - a bit tricky, but successful!

Next week we will be cooking:

Sweetcorn and artichoke fritters with crisp sage leaves and herb yoghurt

Pizza Scrolls

Mini Vegetable Frittatas

Salad of the Imagination

Ravioli with spinach and ricotta filling

Like the green tomatoes, I think the Jerusalem artichokes will be a first for many of us - Sally kindly donated them to us. Our salad will be a little different next week too - students will be provided with a range of ingredients and will select what they would like to use.

Our fourth week and we have yet to find something that our students don't enjoy eating!! This week we cooked:

Mediterranean vegetables stuffed with spicy rice

Beetroot pasta with herb sauce

Pizza of the imagination

Leafy Salad

Apple Crumble with low fat Natural Yoghurt

Litiani rolls the dough for pizza



Regan is making apple crumble



Shannon using the food processor for the apple crumble



Josh making stuffed vegetables




Ellen tasting the salad



Ryan making stuffed vegetables

Billy doing a great job making pizza

pink and green class enjoying lunch

Jo cutting the pizza

Jo was very proud of his pizza

The stuffed vegetables included zucchini, squash, tomatoes and pumpkin and all were thoroughly enjoyed. The beetroot pasta was fun - a great colour (until it was cooked!) and of course provided an opportunity to use the ever popular pasta machine. We had some lovely flowers to add to our leafy salads this week. Pizza and apple crumble enjoyed too of course.

In the garden we have been busy building scarecrows – our latest is a lady who we have called ‘Libby’ – a very glamorous lady with long eyelashes and painted nails!!

Stevan harvested some peas

Ellen did a fantastic job cleaning our the trailer

Cameron did some mulching with Regina

Riley moved compost from one bay to another

Our new scarecrow

We have planted pak choy, mizuna, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, beetroot, pea and onion seedlings and broad bean seeds.

We were very excited to see that our garlic is sprouting already and some of the broccoli that we planted a few weeks ago has started to flower!

Our menus for the last four weeks have been similar so that all students could take a turn at each type of dish, after Easter we will start a new five week rotation and have a slight change of styles.