Landscape Designing, Potting up natives and Mulching

Today Richard Ashcroft came back to Earth School with 3 different designs he had prepared based on the students research and requests for the back field. Richard came in two weeks ago to work with the students and gather all their research and designs together to come up with some design options from those ideas to show to the students.

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Screen Printing, logos and branding

We were excited to have Leanne Taylor come in to teach us all how to screen print. The Earth School Sewing Collective have been working on enterprise ideas for generating funds and making things to sell at the Carterton Farmers Market. We have had a lot of success with our re usable produce bags and our lavender bags. The students discussed the need for branding to let customers know who they were and what they were doing. So we did some work making signs for the market and have had stamps and a screen made with our Earth School Logo.

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Visit to Common Unity Project

On Friday we were lucky enough to visit Epuni School in Lower Hutt and the Common Unity Project that started as a partnership between Epuni school and the local community to grow food on the empty school food, develop outdoor education, fund raise, enhance community connections and feed the students healthy homegrown food 3 days a week.  Sounds somewhat familiar ... although our project has a distinctly Science Technology Engineering and Maths learning focus. The Common Unity Project is growing and a real success story they have outgrown the small classroom at Epuni school and have moved into an old factory across the street.

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Sunshine, mulching, planting and landscape architect Richard Ashcroft

A marvelous sunny day saw the outside team getting stuck into moving the mulch with great gusto. Some were planting in the food forest, some planting the natives donated to us by Akura Nursery Masterton and some mulching the new plants with cardboard and bark chips to suppress the grass and prevent evaporation of the soil around the new plants.

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Student Run Farmers Market

After much preparation the kids successfully ran a farmers market stall in Carterton on Sunday.    The theme of our stall was 'Plastic Free Carterton' students sold a number of items they had made or propagated themselves.  They sold Thunder Bags (reusable fruit and veggie bags with draw string ties donated from Thunderpants), Shirty Shoppers made from old shirts,  baby oaks, baby natives and lavender bags.

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Planting, sewing and designing

Today was our last Earth School of the term.  The students had the opportunity to choose from 3 different activities.  They could either work with Tom to plant natives, continue with designing the farm or sew lavender  bags for sale at the labour weekend farmers market. The planting group enthusiastically dug up and split some of the existing school flaxes, and planted manuka trees.    They made good progress in planting out the area behind the new outdoor classroom.

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