Year 6 Local Community Gardening Service Trip

With thanks to student reporter, Theo Washington, Year 6 

Throughout the year, Saint Kentigern students seek opportunities to be of service of to others. Last Friday, a group of Year 6 students from the Boys’ School spent a day at Glenn Innes Primary School, a Decile 1 school not far from Saint Kentigern, to offer their service in the school garden. 

After meeting for breakfast to plan the day, the boys, accompanied by Reverend Hardie and Year 6 teacher, Mr Topp drove to Glenn Innes and unpacked their tools ready for a day of gardening. The school has vegetable garden beds and a fruit orchard that needed some work in readiness for the summer growing season. Each of the eleven classes at the school has their own garden bed and during the day, children from each class came out to help. 

Overgrown with weeds since last used, the boys spent time weeding, digging out dead plants and removing ‘unwanted guests’ in the vegetable garden, notably snails! It was great to see the soil was rich with worms and we discovered during digging that some of the old plants had long deep roots and others had spread out, fine ones. 

By morning tea, the gardens were looking good, empty of weeds and ready for planting. The boys had morning tea with their fellow students and then went out to play a game of touch rugby to burn off some energy.

After morning tea, the team all headed to Mitre10 to pick up plant and irrigation supplies. Each boy was responsible for finding several items on the list. We wanted the vegetable garden to have a variety of nutritious plants, so we selected strawberries, spinach, lettuce, cucumber, parsley, mint, carrots, tomatoes, courgettes, radishes, celery and beans, as well as some marigolds and snail pellets to keep the bugs away. The gardens also needed fresh soil and equipment to extend and repair the irrigation system as we didn’t want the plants to dry out and die after all our hard work. 

On arrival back at Glen Innes, it started to really rain hard but we were very determined that we wanted to finish all the planting before the end of the day, so we carried on in the rain and got all eleven beds completely planted out.  They looked brilliant! 

Once the planting was complete, we then dug up the irrigation pipes to see where the problems were. We found the problems, taped up the holes and added in all the extra parts we needed to keep the irrigation working and the plants all watered. We were very excited to turn the taps on at the end and see how well the irrigation was working! 

At the end of the day we were all very tired, wet and muddy, but had had a great day with a huge feeling of pride at what we had achieved. We had learnt a lot about gardening and decided that we should have more fruit trees and a vegetable garden back at Saint Kentigern Boys’ School! 

This gardening service project was fun, especially working alongside their students. The principal, staff and children from Glen Innes were thrilled with the end result and we all look forward to hearing from the children who helped, how the gardens fare over summer.