An incredibly warm welcome to 2014!!! The garden just gets bigger and better, as do the incredible smells and flavours from the student kitchen!

Over the summer months the garden has survived the extreme heat – probably better than some of us!! The students are very excited to see “the pumpkins plants going crazy and the pumpkins already so big!” The stunning “sunflowers are standing super tall”, the tomatoes are turning “green to red” the large variety of flavoursome herbs and “beetroots that are bigger than a softball”. We start to say goodbye to our strawberries and hello to apricots- yum!

Students continue to enjoy making their own pasta and tasty pasta sauces – kale pesto this fortnight! They will make salads of their imagination, all sorts of breads and pastries, pickled cucumbers and bottle tomatoes, just to name a few! All recipes can be found on this blog – enjoy!

Rain, hail or shine we were not going to miss out on our garden and kitchen experience! With so much rain the ground in the chook pen turned into a mud pit! It was funny watching everyone try to catch a chook and not fall over!

We had many questions in relation to the health benefits of organic produce and free range eggs, the vegetables with the highest protein content and why this is an essential nutrient. Before we harvested the fennel we didn’t even know what it was! Some students were surprised to see beetroot growing underground.

The carrot muffins were easy to make and tasted delicious. There was enough to take some home and were quickly eaten by my brother!

On Friday August 30th we went to the Kitchen Garden. I’m in Group 1 and we gave the chooks some food and water. It was hard to fill up the chicken’s drinking place with enough water for them to last the weekend but not to overflow it. We collected the 3 eggs they had laid.

Next, we cut the best Rocket leaves off its plant. It was surprising that the leaves didn’t have to be so big.

As it is getting closer to summer, we are about to grow some pumpkins and capsicums  by planting seeds out of actual pumpkins and capsicums!  We filled seed trays with seed-raising mix, put the seeds in and labelled the tray by writing the name of the plant on a popsicle sticks.

On the 3rd of September, we went to the kitchen and my group, group 4, made gnocchi. We got flour, mashed potato and eggs and kneaded them all together. We found it hard not to crack the eggs on our shoes! We next rolled little bits of the mixture up into sausage-like shapes and cut them into gnocchi sized pieces. We cooked them and they were ready to eat. Out of all the things on the menu (Gnocchi with a tomato sauce, Beetroot and Balsamic risotto, salad with Japanese dressing and Honey Cupcakes) my favourite was the honey cupcakes.

Kitchen:
On Tuesday the 3rd of September 5B went to the kitchen, because that week it was Rosh Hashanah, we got to make Honey cake but we also got to make Gnocchi with a Tomato Sauce, Beetroot and Balsamic Risotto and salad with Japanese dressing. Group 4 made the Honey cake. With the honey cake we had to put a lot of honey and flour once we mixed all the ingredients we had to put it into cupcake holders and cook it. Group 3 cooked the beetroot and then mixed it with risotto. Group 5 made the tomato sauce once they got all the ingredients in the pan it was all splashing over them. Group 2 made the gnocchi. They had to use a lot of flour and potato. Group 1 made the salad and Japanese dressing. The Japanese dressing had mirin, celery and ginger whilst in the dressing we usually make has vinegar, garlic and oil. It was great fun and then extremely tasty when we ate it.

As has been done in the past, this year we hosted a group of Year 10 students from the Arava region in Israel. As they come from an agricultural community, they loved spending time in our Kitchen Garden. Some comments by the students were “Wow so many different vegetables are still growing when it’s so cold!”, “Why have you chosen to use sprinklers rather than drip feed watering?”, “The Strawberries are so small and very tasty even when it is Autumn”.