Enviro Cluster & Moth Plant Pod winners

 On Wednesday the 9th of June, Howick Primary held an Enviro cluster meeting in our school hall. We had a lot of fun and a lot of schools and businesses came together to share their experiences in helping the environment. 

As Howick Primary; we shared our experiences including talking about our traffic light bin system and how the red bin is for landfill rubbish, the yellow bin is for recycling and the green for food scraps going to our compost/ worm farm. We also made a game that everyone who came would be able to play. We handed out little game packs that included a piece of red, yellow and green paper. It also had pictures of different types of litter and we asked the players to sort out the pictures onto the right piece of coloured paper. These represented the different bins. 

 

 In the cluster we had special people to come up and present the moth plant pod competition winners. Everyone in the hall was feeling the exciting suspense. They had a lot of different categories such as kindergartens/preschools, Primary schools, Intermediates and Colleges. In the Primary category our school came third place! We collected 2388 pods. We learnt it was important to collect these pods otherwise the seeds inside of them spread and grow new pods. These new pods strangle and kill our native New Zealand trees. 

 

-Emma Bloxham

Thank You Highland Park Countdown!

 

Howick Primary Garden Working Bee.

On  Sunday 27th June 2021 Howick Primary held a working bee. 

The goal of the day was to make more planter boxes for Garden to Table and cut down all the cabbage trees outside of rooms 3 & 4.

We got to work and started digging up the grass behind senior classrooms to make room for new planters boxes. We stacked the squares of grass in the staff car park.

 

 

Meanwhile lots of people were hard at work digging up the grass. Joe (Jackson & Jade's dad) was using a chainsaw to cut down the cabbage trees.

We had a break at around 11:00am. We had vegetable soup, lime and white chocolate brownie, coffee and milo. After a quick break we got back to work.

After the break we took all the roots out from under the grass that we had dug up so that weeds could not grow again.

It was not long till we packed up but we got the wooden pegs in and put the frames up for the planter boxes. Joe had finished cutting down all the cabbage trees too!

We packed up, washed all the tools we used, put them away and all headed home at around 1:00pm.

It was a nice hard working day outside doing gardening.

Jackson.B (Room 2) & Jade.B (Room 7)

Matariki Soup

 As we had so many pumpkins in our veggie garden, we decided to celebrate Matariki by making a soup. 

Bakers Delight in Howick kindly gifted us some bread and bread rolls to go with it. Our Garden to Table groups also made some lemon and coconut slice at their sessions so everyone got a tiny square of that to try too! 

Many people loved the soup and came back for seconds and even thirds! 

Find the recipe HERE. 

We left out the ginger and almond butter and halved the garlic. 

Garden to Table - May round up

 This month was definitely the month of feijoas and beetroots - they just kept on coming! 

We found lots of different recipes with beetroot - hummus, salad and even chocolate brownies! 

With the feijoas we enjoyed making muffins, crumble and bliss balls (and added bonus that they also used up some limes I had left over from home!) 

  

In the garden the focus was on mulching and composting. We had a HUGE pile of mulch to move and spread and now the gardens look transformed.

 

As part of International language week and Samoan language week we celebrated different cultures with the food we made - Fa'apapa bread, Pani popo and Tabbouli. The breads were particularly popular. 

In this picture the students are shaping the bread before baking. Yum! 

Garden to Table MAY

New term, new groups! 

This week we saw 2 new classes having their first Garden to Table session. 

In the garden we've been busy planting, weeding and turning the compost.

In the kitchen we continued to use our influx of feijoas with more delicious feijoa muffins and finished up most of the greens with cheese and green fritters. Both were a hit! 

Garden to Table APRIL 2021

With lots of produce still going strong in the garden we had the opportunity to make a wide range of delicious foods.

This included pizza, chocolate bliss balls (well it is Easter!), salads, courgette muffins and feijoa muffins (they'll be plenty of those still to come!) 

The pizza was a particular favourite as we were able to experiment so much with the sauces (used some of our pesto) as were the muffins.

Garden to Table session # 3

 Wednesday 24 March -  Going Green!

This lovely sunny Wednesday morning saw our garden team carry out the MAMMOTH task of moving ALL the green waste from the compost area to the carpark side! 

In true Howick Primary form, the children got on with the task in cheerful spirits enjoying the experience of a job well done in looking after their patch of earth. 

Little did they know what yummy nourishment was being whipped up and awaiting them after all this hard work!

 The Kitchen team were on task, blitzing up a Green smoothie, using spinach and avocados from an ex-teacher's farm (an awesome sense of community for the children!).  Silverbeet, spring onions and herbs from our garden were chopped and battered, with a bit of cheese for that extra zing, to create scrumptious greens and cheese fritters, Yummy! 

Accompanied with Kale chips, made from freshly harvested kale from our garden. 

A crunchy finish to the Garden to Table experience for the day!

By Kieran & Anita

HPS Movie and Carnival Night- Waste Collection.

 

On Friday 19 March, we organised a HPS Carnival

and Movie night,  we had food trucks outside the turf

and some activities to try. 

We are trying to have less waste in our school to protect

the school's environment. We sorted all the waste

to put in our worm farm or recycling.

We picked up the rubbish and put it in the right bin.

We tried putting less waste to the landfill bin.

We had 4 bins we had to sort, 

• Recycling- yellow, 

• Landfill- red, 

• Food Scraps- green and finally 

• Orange is for the soft plastics. 

We had food scraps the most and all of us were proud because there was just a little bit in the landfill. We emptied all rubbish bins in some food trucks and some people were commenting on us that we should keep it up. We also helped some people that had trouble sorting their rubbish.

FINAL RESULTS: 30kg of waste collected

-15kg of Food scraps (green)

-10kg of Recycling (yellow)

-1.5kg of Soft Plastic (orange)

-3.5kg of Landfill (red)

By: Isabella S. and Amelie :) 

Visy Recycling Open Day Sessions

Ever wondered how your kerbside recycling gets sorted? 

Are you sure you know what goes in the recycling bin?

If you'd like to learn more about recycling in Auckland you can go to this FREE session to find out more! 

Just register HERE to go along THIS Saturday.