Hydroponics, worms and more!

Hi all,

So, it's been quite the wet, cold week but we've still been super productive with our gardening!

We started with one Tower Garden in our classroom but now have TWO! These gardens are absolutely fantastic and allow us to grow all sorts of fresh greens hydroponically. We just finished planting a fresh round of mesclun mix in the new tower garden and are hoping to harvest some yummy mustard greens, leaf lettuce, pak choi and Italian parsley from it soon! Our older tower garden is ready to be harvested and we are hoping to create a salad for the school using the greens we cut!

Our two tower gardens.  Left is our brand new one with a fresh planting of tasty greens!
Right is our tower garden ready to be harvested.

The students have also been very busy covering our strawberry patch to make sure the berries are insulated from the frost.  We're hoping this will prevent damage to the plants and that we'll be eating juicy berries soon!

On the nice days, we were very busy filling our existing garden beds with soil and topping them up with some composted sheep manure (from Ritchie Feed and Seed).  We're so interested in composting and decided also to get a vermicomposter to help reduce our waste and provide much wanted compost to our garden in future years.  We decided on the Worm Factory 360 and will keep you posted on how it goes! We've set it up and are anxiously awaiting our worms so we can start composting our food scraps!

Worm Factory 360!

One of our garden beds topped up with garden soil
and some sheep manure

Our next task is to build some new garden beds so we can expand the space in which we can grow healthy foods for our school!  Growing Up Organic has provided us with beautiful lumber, hardware, landscaping fabric and garden soil for three new beds! Will update you on them once we've built them!

Happy gardening!

- NJ Gardeners