A Big Welcome to New Lynn School’s Bees!
New Lynn School students will soon be making their very own honey from their very own bees. You can see the two beehives in the photo behind some of our gardening-group pupils.

In September, our Gardening and Leadership groups hosted 14 visitors from Kiwicare Preschool.  The children came to look at our sustainable gardens and helped us to plant strawberry plants, ready for summer.  Here are some photos of the visit:

In June we held a school-wide planting day. We had the Hire a Hubby company donate their time to build planter boxes for our school garden.

The rest of the school, under Mrs Crosby's and Mrs Gardner's guidance, planted 470 plants in the Rewarewa Stream. This is the stream that runs between our school and the Karamea Retirement Village homes. It was fun working with adults and students to make our environment a more beautiful place.

Here are some photos that capture aspects of our eventful day:

A warm welcome to our visitors:

Our school's Rewarewa Stream Planting day was fun...

First we had to check that the water quality was clean after all our rubbish collecting:

Then we planted all of our beautiful plants:

We are really enjoying getting stuck-in to improve our school and the Karamea Retirement Village's community environments.

A group of students are pitching in with a neighbouring retirement village to spruce up Rewarewa Stream. Their work on the stream is part of the Ecomatters Trust Sustainable Neighbourhood Stream Project which aims to get neighbours working together to better their environment. The residents of the retirement village are delighted with the work that is being done.

Our Gardening group also maintains the school vegetable gardens and fruit trees, selling fresh produce on Wednesday afternoons.

The gardening group is about planting a variety of plants and learning about the importance of water and nutrients to feed them. Sometimes we cook using the produce from out amazing garden. For one session our garden group gathered around our big table and ate our school-made silverbeet and feta muffins. The silverbeet was carefully grown in our own school garden. Savory feta cheese made our stomachs hungry for more. Recently we learned how to make pickled beetroot which we will sell in our new produce shop.

In 2009 our garden group was nominated for the Best Garden Group in West Auckland Waitakere. Our school caretaker won runner-up for the best presented school. When we heard about it we were so proud (and still are).

2009 Garden Awards	Thriving Cabbages
Compost Area	Getting the soil ready

Mr Grace is a professional gardener who helps and teaches us about how to plant and harvest. He started to help our garden group in 2009 and he still helps us today. We also have Ms Jo-Anna and Mrs Gardner helping to teach us the important skills of successful gardening.

Compost Area

In the gardening group we are planting seeds in a pot with moist brown potting mix. After we had watered he seeds we put them into the gardening room hoping that they might grow. After several weeks the seeds might start spouting big, healthy shoots.

Preparing our seeds



Planting our fruit trees