Herbal & Kitchen Gardens At Schools

After a short snooze, we at SPACES are back with some interesting projects that we have finished in the past few months.

We had the opportunity to work with two schools who were inspired by the idea of showing their students some common, indigenous herbs and plant varieties that were available within our vicinity. The staff at one particular school specially stressed on the point about how children were completely ignorant of these plants, their existence or their use. We hope the children have been able to gain the experience we have tried to inculcate.

At AMM Matriculation School at Kotturpuram, Chennai, the available space was just the terrace and we had taken it upon ourselves to make the best use of the area. And to be able to give the children a wholesome experience at least in terms of the different species of herbal plants and its types.

Here’s a pot shot of the entire terrace herbal garden placed by us.

Here we have our creeper section of the herbs.

Our initial stage of the miniature garden-lawn-waterbody.

For Rosary Matriculation School, since we could work on the ground, we had created for them both a kitchen and a herbal garden in the assigned plot of land.  We created a pebbled pathway in between where the students could walk through and observe the various plantations which we had labelled with their scientific and local identities. Here are a few glimpses of the same.

herbs around the tree at Rosary Matriculation – by SPACES

herbal garden patch at Rosary matric – done by SPACES

a view of the entire kitchen garden patch after the seeds are sown

bitter gourd

a close up of the vegetable creeper plant

creeper of the avarai plant

ridge gourd growing stages – peerkangai

“Seeing is believing” someone has rightly said. We hope we might have helped alter these students’ outlook a bit by introducing them to the food chain!

If you believe your school needs a concept such as this to exist ,then approach SPACES at gardeningredefined.com and get your ideas implemented through us!!

Revisit to Red Hills

Sixteen days had gone by since the group of twelve volunteers had battled it out in the terrace to equip a vegetable garden for the kids at the Shelter at Red Hills. Tentatively, we arrived at the gates , the children were busy attending Sunday Mass, and we went straight into the terrace , eager to see the results of our handicraft. There were so many doubts .. did the structures still stay strong, had the saplings grown for all the veggies, had the pandal structure stood the test of the winds.

The sight which was awaiting us was one which would rise our spirits by the double.

The children had taken care of the seeds like they were their own, everything looked healthy and was growing fine. All the structures were intact and pretty strong. happy and content, we set about with transplanting some of the tomatoes , brinjals and the chillies into separate containers thereby avoiding crowding and stunted growth.

We also removed the plastic covering underneath the bigger pots,afraid of stagnation of water.We gave them instructions to keep changing the position of the containers slightly every 2 weeks.

 

By the time we were done transplanting, the kids were done with their prayers too and were eager to come up, curious to see what the annas and the akkas were up to. We taught them how to transplant , how to water without doing excess , and how to keep cuttings of plants and propagate them like indian borage, perandai  etc

One little fellow followed my suit and started watering the plants and the rest followed.

Soon the two hours just flew by and it was time to leave and we had time for one last photo session.

 

 

Until next time. 🙂